


hold on to you, hold on to me

by zoicite



Series: hold on to you, hold on to me [1]
Category: Being Human (UK)
Genre: F/M, Fighting and Kissing, Kissing and Fighting, M/M, Multi, Post-Series, Series 5
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-21
Updated: 2013-04-21
Packaged: 2017-12-09 01:43:15
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 28,574
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/768516
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zoicite/pseuds/zoicite
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>One moment they were human and then the moment passed.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

There were four this time. They were incompetent and green. It was easy for Tom and he wondered for a moment why Hal had started underestimating him again. 

It didn’t matter though, not really. It didn’t matter how many vampires there were. What mattered was that Tom had come. He’d taken the bait with little hesitation. He’d followed Hal’s clumsy vampire to the abandoned warehouse, not far from where they’d confronted the Old Ones. Tom wasn’t surprised to find Hal there waiting and armed. He’d known where this was headed as soon as he saw the vampire standing on the corner outside the house.

“If you ignore it maybe he’ll stop,” Alex suggested. 

He didn’t want to ignore it. He thought they needed it, this reminder of what Hal had become.

Four vampires. Stupid and careless, all black eyes and fangs. As Hal stood back and watched, they came at Tom and Tom raised his stake. He was ready.

**

It didn’t take much to outsmart a vampire. Some muscle and some stakes, a cross or two, some common sense. Most vampires were stupid. That was rule number one. They just came at you all black eyes and pointy teeth, no thought at all. 

Most vampires were easy. Killing them was nothing if you knew what you were doing. McNair made sure that Tom knew exactly what he was doing right from the start. Always aim for the heart, never get caught, never ever let them throw you in one of their cages. The dogfights could change a man, McNair said. The cage rotted a man from the inside out, but not all at once. It took time. A stake was a mercy compared to the cage. 

Anyway, most vampires weren’t interested in the fights. Not anymore. Most vampires didn’t see McNair coming, didn’t plan at all, only reacted. Most vampires were stupid.

But there were still dogfights out there. They still happened. In Lowestoft and Blackpool and Barry. They happened in Cornwall, so McNair said, though they’d always steered clear there. The point was, they happened. (Tom guessed that, after everything, they might be happening more often now. He wasn’t sure. He knew they weren’t happening again in Barry though. Not yet.)

Most vampires were stupid, that was true. But few and far between there were vampires out there who used their heads, who planned instead of coming at you, their black eyes like deep pits in the earth. Those were the vampires that you had to watch out for.

“The most dangerous vampire,” McNair had told him again and again, “is the vampire that plays the long game.”

Tom was never sure what McNair meant at the start. The long game. A vampire fight was over fast. You won or you lost. If you won, you wiped off your stake, added fangs to your collection. If you lost, you ran or you died. Tom had always assumed that the long game had to do with the fights, with the cage, with the rotting.

And then Hal came and Annie invited him to stay. 

**

Hal glanced down at his watch, eyebrows raised, as the fourth vampire crumbled into dust at Tom’s feet. 

“Oh, I’m boring you, am I?” Tom guessed, his breath coming out in heavy gasps around the words. After all, four vampires were still four vampires. Easy was relative.

“Not at all,” Hal returned. He stepped forward and Tom tightened his grip on his stake.

Hal wasn’t stupid. His eyes weren’t black and his fangs weren’t out, but Hal was the most dangerous vampire that Tom had ever met. Tom had to remember that. He had to remember it even when he looked at Hal and still saw his best mate there, the same guy he bonded with at the café, the same guy who had Tom’s back, who sometimes looked at Tom like – his fucking best mate.

You deserve better friends, Hal had said. It was probably true, but Tom didn’t have better friends, did he? He had Alex and he had Hal and that was it. And now Hal – 

When Hal got close enough, Tom didn’t hesitate. He started swinging right away, but Hal anticipated it and blocked his first two blows, twisted Tom’s wrist until he had no choice but to drop his stake. It didn’t matter. He had another in his pocket. Hal’s free hand came up and pushed at Tom’s shoulder, right where it met Tom’s neck, so Tom stumbled back before he caught his footing. He surged forward into Hal, knocking Hal off balance and causing Hal to release Tom’s hand. Tom punched Hal in the stomach, and Hal doubled over in pain.

Tom didn’t wait for Hal to recover. He rushed at Hal, but Hal caught him right at the last moment and turned so it was Tom that was pushed up against the wall, struggling beneath Hal’s grip, his arm twisted behind his back and his cheek pressed against the bricks.

“Shh,” Hal said. He leaned in close by Tom’s ear. “Shh.” Like Tom might just stop fighting, might just let Hal kill him. Tom twisted and turned and eventually Hal let him move so that Tom’s back was to the wall instead. He kicked at Hal’s shin and Hal grunted and shoved Tom back so Tom’s head knocked against the wall, the flash of pain spreading through his head, hot and white.

And then Hal kissed him.

Tom’s head was pounding from the impact, and he stood there stunned for a moment when Hal’s mouth came in to cover his. Hal’s hands were still fisted in Tom’s coat, pushing him against the wall so that Tom couldn’t escape, but Hal’s mouth felt – not gentle, but not violent either. Insistent. Tom felt some of the fight slip out of him. He reached up to grip at Hal’s coat, suddenly unsure if he meant to push Hal away or pull him closer. 

This wasn’t why he’d come here. He didn’t want this reminder. This wasn’t that world anymore. 

Tom reached for the stake in his pocket, but before he pulled it out, he made sure to kiss Hal back.

**

This was how it went. 

One moment they were human and then the moment passed. 

They woke up in a cell at the Department of Domestic Defence, Alex a ghost and Hal and Tom with feeding tubes stuck in their abdomens. Blood dripped from the end of the tube when Hal pulled it away and he wiped at it with his fingers, licked them clean without hesitation. Tom felt his stomach turn at the sight, and when Hal looked up and caught Tom’s eye, Tom was quick to turn away.

Alex called out, shouted for Rook, then for anyone. She cursed and she screamed and then she made Tom call for her, but even then no one came. Finally Hal bluntly reminded Alex that she was a ghost again and Alex rentaghosted out of the cell, began searching for the key to release Tom and Hal. While they waited, Tom paced as far from Hal as he could get, back and forth by the bars. If he’d had a stake he might have tried something, threatened at least, but there was nothing to be done. Not until Alex got them out anyway. Hal leaned against the wall, arms folded over his chest. 

“You should see how you look,” Hal said. “Like a wild animal locked in a zoo, pacing the perimeter. Searching for weaknesses.”

“Shut up, Hal.” 

“Werewolves,” Hal concluded. Tom thought it sounded a bit affectionate really, and he looked up to find Hal smiling at him. It didn’t look like a very nice smile.

For a second at the start Tom thought that maybe they would have Hal back even here, even though their conditions had been there all along. Maybe what had happened while they were there changed what they were here, but Tom’s heart fell as soon as Alex started shouting and Hal opened his mouth. Before that. He knew as soon as Hal licked the blood from his fingers. Tom saw Alex harden, her body stiff, business-like, and he knew she’d secretly hoped for the same thing.

The DoDD was just about empty (a bad sign) except for one or two people – humans – who seemed completely disoriented and couldn’t remember how they got there or what they’d been doing (a worse sign). It didn’t take Alex long to obtain the keys. Searching out Regus was Hal’s idea. 

“Regus is useless when it comes to many things,” Hal reasoned. “But he’ll be keeping up on this.”

Regus wasn’t hard to locate. Most of the DoDD had been emptied, but it seemed that they hadn’t finished clearing things out entirely before it all started. Alex found a few boxes of Type 2 files sitting near the entrance.

“Here!” she said. Regus’s file wasn’t in any of the boxes, but Michaela’s was.

Alex asked questions that none of them could answer while Hal flipped through the file, skimmed for a location, somewhere to start.

Tom didn’t say anything, just stared hard at Hal. Once Alex had released them, Tom had broken a chair, and he held the broken leg of it tight, just in case, though he didn’t think Hal was actually going to try anything. Hal had worked with them before anyway. Tom just wanted to be prepared.

“You see the way he looks at me like this is somehow my fault?” Hal asked Alex. “He’s already forgotten that the reason we’re back here rests entirely in his lap. When this is finished, I’ll have to remember to thank him.”

“I should stake you right now,” Tom returned, but he didn’t. Of course he didn’t.

**

“I thought you’d be here sooner,” Regus admitted. “No one knew what had happened to you lot. I was starting to think you might be dead.” He looked up, squinted at Alex. “Who’s this?”

“Alex, Regus,” Hal said, waving a hand between them. “Regus, Alex.”

“Where’s Michaela?” Tom asked.

“She’s in Japan,” Regus said. He gestured toward the books and the papers. “I was boring her. She left before – well, before everything. Don’t worry, she’ll be back.”

“I wasn’t worried,” Tom assured him.

Regus nodded, pleasantries out of the way, and started flipping through the pages of a really old dusty looking book. 

“So where is he?” Tom asked, trying to move things along. He was anxious. The state of things outside – would it be like that if they’d figured it out sooner? Could they have stopped it? “Where’s the Devil?”

“Oh, he isn’t the Devil.”

Regus said it like it was just some throwaway remark, but Tom started, turned to stare at Alex, who glanced back, eyebrows raised.

"What do you mean he isn't the Devil?" Hal asked, his arms folded across his chest.

"I mean, he isn't _the_ Devil," Regus repeated. 

"Then what is he?" Tom asked.

"I don't know," Regus admitted. " _A_ devil, probably. Maybe a demon with delusions of grandeur. All I know is that he can't be _the_ Devil. It wouldn’t make any sense. It's impossible."

Hal glanced at Tom, a slight roll of the eyes as he unfolded his arms and then moved in to lean against the edge of Regus's table. Regus pulled back, uncomfortable with Hal's sudden proximity. Regus didn’t seem to like this side of Hal much either. Hal leaned closer.

"You have the story," Hal said, his voice slow, the words careful. "I told you what happened in France. You've known it for years."

"Yes," Regus agreed, though he sounded less confident now. "I know the story, Hal. I researched everything you told me then. The curse, all of it. And everything I've found suggests a run of the mill demon on a rampage. Probably trying to jump the ranks. I don't know how they order these things. A devil, _the_ Devil with a capital D, could not be confined in a human form. The Devil could not even be summoned, if he exists at all. You think there's a curse that summons God too?"

**

Even before they figured it out, there were clues.

Sometimes Tom still felt it in him, like it was trying to claw its way out. He felt it scratching at his stomach and his ribs, pulling at his bones. It left him aching, like after a fight. It didn’t happen often, but it did happen, and on the night when it felt the strongest and hurt the most Tom rushed out into the back garden and stared up at the sky. There it was. A full moon.

He sat on the edge of the table, picked at the peeling green paint with his finger. He pulled small strips of it off the wood as he stared. There was too much light here, but he imagined what the sky must look like in the woods, at McNair's grave. There’d be stars there. Not a lot because the moon was so bright, but more than here.

He heard the door click and Hal came to stand beside him. Hal didn’t say anything, but he stood close to Tom, close enough that when Tom shifted, their arms brushed. He heard Hal let out his breath as though he’d been holding it for something.

“I’ve never actually seen it before, ‘cept in pictures,” Tom said.

Hal was watching Tom, but he said nothing. The tips of Hal’s fingers played at the corner of the table, close to where Tom’s still pulled at the paint. Tom continued.

“Almost full, sure, I’ve seen that loads of times, but never a proper full moon.”

The way Hal was looking at him it was like he was trying to learn something, but he still wasn’t saying it, whatever it was, and finally Tom had to look away. He looked back up at the sky, but he couldn’t concentrate on it now. He dropped his head to stare at his trainers instead. 

“Can you still feel it?” Hal asked, finally. 

“Yeah,” Tom said. He didn’t look up. “I think I can a little, sometimes.”

Hal nodded.

“Can you?” Tom asked.

Hal didn’t respond at first, but he shook his head, just slightly. When Tom looked up Hal said, “I think it must be psychosomatic. We’ve lived with our conditions for so long, your entire life and for me – five hundred years is a long time to – it’s psychosomatic.“

“If anyone here is psycho, mate, it’s you,” Tom said. He wasn’t offended, not really, but he had to point it out. If Alex was out here with them, she would have jumped on it too, he was sure.

Hal huffed a little, but he didn’t disagree. His fingers brushed against Tom’s hand. Tom thought that if he turned his over, Hal might slide his palm over Tom’s, take Tom’s hand in his. Since they’d become human, it felt to Tom like there was something building between them. Tom didn’t understand what it was, not yet, but this felt like that, like he was waiting for something. Or Hal was waiting, maybe. Alex, too. Tom shrugged, but he didn’t turn his hand and Hal didn’t touch him again. 

“I didn’t mean psychotic,” Hal clarified eventually. “Psychosomatic. I think that these…symptoms are in our heads. That’s all. They’re residuals. Memories.”

“Yeah,” Tom said. He looked back up at the moon. “Maybe. I don’t know.” 

Even then he was pretty sure that this time, for once, Hal was wrong. Even then he thought he felt the lie of it deep in his gut.

**

“We have to stop meeting like this,” Hal said, barely able to keep the smile from his face. Tom had taken out Hal’s vampires in mere moments; six this time. Some of them knew a thing or two, weren’t new at all. It was a harder fight than it had been the last few times that they’d done this, but not too hard. And now here he was, advancing on Hal, one stake in each hand.

Hal’s hands were beckoning him forward, fingers curling in toward his palms, and Tom shouted as he rushed at Hal, his shoulder connecting with Hal’s chest and knocking them both to the ground. He dropped one of his stakes and Hal kicked it away, the sound of it sliding across the floor loud over their grunts. Hal followed that up by kicking at Tom and Tom scrambled back and got to his feet. Hal was on his feet again too, but Tom was ready, grabbing Hal and pushing hard so that Hal stumbled and then Tom was on him, pulling him to his feet and shoving him against a concrete pillar. 

Tom held the stake over Hal’s chest, his other hand fisted in Hal’s coat, pushing his shoulder back against the concrete.

“Go on,” Hal said. “Go on, Tom. What are you waiting for?”

Tom stared hard at the point of the stake, the way it pressed into the fabric of Hal’s shirt. He tried to imagine himself going through with it, plunging it in, breathing dust into his lungs and knowing that a moment before that dust had been Hal.

Tom released Hal, pushed away. He shouted and threw his stake hard across the room. It clattered against the far wall.

"You don't have to pretend anymore," Hal said. Tom had his back turned toward Hal, but it didn’t matter. He could hear the smile in Hal’s words. He could hear how much Hal enjoyed this. "I see you too well for that now. I know how far you're willing to go to get the things you want."

"I don't want you though," Tom said. He wiped his face against the shoulder of his coat and then he shook his head. "Not anymore."

"No?" Hal asked. "Then what are we doing? Why do we keep coming back here?"

"One of these days, I'm gonna kill ya," Tom said, sure in his heart that it was true. One of these days he'd find the resolve. He'd find it and he'd let Hal go. How many vampires would it take? How many deaths would he tally? They were responsible, Tom and Alex. That’s what they’d said. Tom was going to have to kill Hal. 

“I’m gonna kill ya,” Tom repeated. He thought it sounded more sure this time, more confident.

Hal must not have thought so because Hal was still smiling and suddenly Tom wanted to grab him, shake him. He wanted to feel his fingers pressing hard into the muscles of Hal's arms. He wanted to knock the smirk from Hal's mouth. He wanted - 

"Ah," Hal said, knowing. His eyebrows rose as his smile stretched wider. Tom hated it when Hal smiled at him now. His face didn't light up with it, not the same way it used to, but it still hurt just the same anyway. Tom's fists clenched at his sides and he shook his head, looked away. When he looked back up at Hal, Hal pursed his lips, mimed a kiss, and Tom snapped.

“You remember that,” McNair had said once. “A vampire’s got all the time in the world. Playing with you is just an evening’s entertainment.”

An evening’s entertainment. 

Hal grunted when Tom hit his chest again, stumbled backward, and Tom kept pushing, didn't stop until he had Hal backed up, pressed against the crumbling wall of the warehouse, his hands hard on Hal's shoulders. Hal was still smiling just a little, and he leaned in toward Tom, his voice low, nearly a whisper.

"There you are," he said. 

“Here I am,” Tom agreed. 

“Yes,” Hal said, at the same time that Tom pushed at him. It made the word sound like a groan of pleasure. “Lethal, efficient, but you won’t kill me, just as I have no intention of killing you. That’s not really what we want from each other, is it?”

“I don’t know what you’re on about,” Tom sniffed, but it was a lie. He understood Hal perfectly.

“It’s foreplay," Hal said. Somehow he made the word sound even dirtier than Tom would have expected. Not that Tom ever expected anything like this from Hal. “Right from the very start. You think it’s ever been anything else?”

**

Sometimes Tom imagined how life could have gone if he could’ve just kept Hal good; if he’d been more responsible, if he hadn’t been so selfish, if he’d taken it all more seriously. Hal told them right at the start what he needed. But that was the thing – they’d needed things too. Tom couldn’t do it on his own then. He couldn’t pay for Hal and Annie and baby Eve. Hal had to work too. 

Even so, Tom had tried, and it seemed like Hal was doing well. He seemed good at the café, at least most of the time. Yes, it was true that there were times when it was hard. He could see it on Hal’s face. Hal would go all quiet, tense. His mouth would tremble, just slightly at first, and if Tom was busy, couldn’t intervene, he could see Hal’s grip on the counter tighten. He could see Hal’s knuckles turn white with the strain. Tom was always there though. He was there to pull Hal away, to distract him. 

“I shouldn’t be here,” Hal said once, early on, as he paced the back room.

“You’re doing good,” Tom insisted. He kept his eye on the front. He’d have to leave Hal here if a customer came in.

“If you knew what was in my head, you wouldn’t allow me to be here,” Hal said.

“I think I have a pretty good idea,” Tom said. “You were thinking about ripping all those people apart.”

Hal closed his eyes and took a deep breath. Tom tried to imagine what it must be like, though he didn’t really want to know. The way Hal shuddered, even the insides of his eyelids must seem red right then. 

“What did Leo used to do for you?” Tom asked.

“What?”

“He must’ve done something,” Tom reasoned.

“He didn’t force me to work in a café,” Hal pointed out, his words clipped and tight. 

But Hal had gotten used to it. Tom thought it seemed like it was even good for him, spending more time out there, getting used to being around people again. Tom had thought it would make Hal stronger. Good strong, not, you know, killing people strong. 

“I want you to be my new Leo,” Hal had said once, and Tom thought that that was the moment. That was the moment when he knew that they were really friends, mates. Hal had been visibly nervous about it. He was asking Tom to take care of him, to care for him. He was saying that he trusted Tom to keep him safe.

Tom had been flattered. He’d been honored. And he’d tried. He really did try, but not hard enough. He just kept pushing. He couldn’t be Leo. He needed too much from Hal. He needed someone to take care of him too. And then there was Cutler and there was Alex and the Old Ones and the chair. There was the two months of feeding Hal and listening to Hal as he tried to sleep. Of emptying the bucket and cleaning Hal up. It was worth it, he thought. Even when Hal said things that cut and hurt, it was worth it because Tom knew then that Hal was his best mate.

Leo would have done it differently. Leo would have kept the house clean. He wouldn’t have made Hal so desperate to escape. Leo knew that two months weren’t enough. He probably didn’t even have to ask. 

Leo would have stepped up once Annie was gone. He would have set the rules. He wouldn’t have let Hal take charge. He wouldn’t have needed Hal to take charge, to tell Leo what his place should be. Leo seemed like a man who knew what he was doing. Tom never knew.

Fifty-five years. That’s what Leo had, right? More than that. Fifty-five years, Hal and Leo and Pearl. Tom and Hal and Alex. Sometimes Tom was sure it was all that he really wanted. If he’d been given a choice – and he was – he’d have chosen them every time. He loved them. He needed them. 

“It’s incomplete without you,” Hal had said when they’d come to him in that dream version of the house. Alex was there too, of course. She leaned in to press a kiss to Tom’s shoulder. 

Tom knew that he was just as much responsible for Alex’s death as Hal was. Hal never would have phoned Alex if Tom hadn’t pushed. He wondered if Hal ever thought of that too. Alex kissed Tom’s shoulder and he wondered if Alex even knew.

She did that sometimes then. She reached out and touched them like she couldn’t believe it. She couldn’t believe that they were all real.

It was one of the reasons that Tom hadn’t said anything sooner.

**

Tom saw the sign one day when he was walking home from a confrontation with Hal. He felt tired and bruised, and if he was admitting it to himself – which he wasn’t – a little aroused (it was almost time for his change. He tried to tell himself that that must have something to do with it). He was itching to get back to the house, to shower and eat, but the sign caused him to slow to a stop. 

Tony had apparently survived Hatch’s scourge and now that Barry was trying to clean itself up, pick itself up off its feet, the Café on the Corner was reopening. The sign in the window was looking for help. Tom glanced down at himself, then up and down the empty street and then, before he could change his mind, he went inside. 

It didn’t take as much convincing as Tom had expected before Tony agreed to give him his job back. He even asked about Hal.

“No,” Tom said. He shook his head. “Hal won’t be back.” He looked around the café. He’d loved it here once. He’d been comfortable here and he’d loved working with Hal. This was where they’d come to understand each other. It was where they’d bonded. He thought that that was probably why he wanted the job back. Well, that and he really didn’t want to go anywhere near the Barry Grand.

“Did he - ?” Tony started to ask, but he trailed off before he finished. It didn’t matter. Tom understood. Everyone in Wales understood that question. Tony was asking if Hal had died.

“No,” Tom shrugged. “He’s not dead. Well, not properly.”

“You can’t convince him to come back then?” Tony asked. “We aren’t busy – well, you can see that.” He gestured to the empty café. “But Barry’s waking up. We’re rebuilding, and you’ve gotta be ready, you know. I could use the help.”

“Um,” Tom said. “Hal’s a vampire.” It felt weird to say it out loud and not have to explain.

“Oh,” Tony said, eyebrows raised. He shifted, uncomfortable, in his seat. “Oh. Right. I imagine he has other things going on then.” He laughed just a little, probably to ease the tension. Either that or he didn’t believe Tom. The vampires in Wales had kept a low profile so far.

Tom nodded. “Yeah.”

He played with a frayed section at the bottom of his shirt, and then he looked up at Tony. He thought about just admitting it. “And I’m a werewolf”, he’d say. What did it matter? Tony probably didn’t believe him anyway. And technically they were out now. He could just say it. But it was still new. It had all just happened and no one knew yet what would come next. They didn’t know if people would retaliate. Better just to keep it to himself.

In the end he simply said, “I’ll be needing Thursday night off.”

**

This was how the world finally learned.

They heard the news two days after they woke up in the DoDD cell. The Devil (still in Hatch’s body – switching to Rook’s had apparently all been part of the Devil’s trick) was wreaking havoc somewhere in South America, having already paid his visits to England and Europe and a few other places besides. Regus told them where, but Tom couldn’t keep all the names and places straight. It didn’t matter. What mattered was that a vampire named Carl, a werewolf named Paulo, and an unnamed ghost cornered Hatch and completed the ritual. They succeeded where Tom and Hal and Alex had miserably failed. 

The trinity died, Hatch died, and the vampires saw opportunity.

“What do you know?” Hal asked, laughing as they listened to the news broadcast over the radio. “It would appear that Cutler had it right all along. Show them something worse. Leave it to Hetty to follow through.”

Tom didn’t remember Hetty, but Hal said she was an Old One. A vampire with the body of a little girl, he said. She must have escaped the explosion. They listened as she talked of the dead trinity as martyrs, as heroes. They listened as people cheered.

“What happens now?” Alex asked.

“Bolivia will love Hetty,” Hal said. “They’ll fall at her feet, bare their necks for her. Brazil will follow, perhaps Chile. Of course, there will be some that won’t be caught up in her spell. They’ll retaliate. Eventually there might be a war.”

Regus nodded as he considered Hal’s prediction. “It’s an interesting time. It’ll change everything.”

“Yes,” Hal agreed. His stance was rigid, arms folded across his chest. Tom couldn’t quite read it. Was it hesitation? Anticipation? Jealousy?

“So what do we do then?” Alex asked. She looked from Tom to Regus, then back to Hal.

“Nothing,” Regus shrugged. “We wait and see how it all plays out.”

“But she’s going to take over,” Alex said, pointing at the radio. “You heard the report – it’s just like the Old Ones all over again. Shouldn’t we blow her up or something? Finish the job?”

“Alex is right,” Tom said. They had to be back for a reason. They had to fix things.

Hal shook his head. “Hetty is a far cry from Mr. Snow. Ultimately, Hetty craves comfort and stability. She can be brutal, yes, and she can be fickle, but she can be just too. As long as she’s adored. And listen to them; they adore her already.”

“For now,” Regus agreed.

“For now,” Hal amended.

"What did we come back for?” Alex asked, her voice rising a little. “Why are we even here if we aren’t going to do anything? She’s a _vampire_. People will die.”

“People have been dying for weeks. All that Hatch offered was death, disease, famine, war. Compared to that, Hetty will feel like relief, like order restored. And vampires are nothing new, after all. The world has long survived with us in it.”

“But then there was no point to any of it?” Alex asked. “The War Child prophecy, Eve, Annie’s unfinished business. None of it changed anything?”

“Of course it did,” Regus said.

Hal was becoming visibly impatient with Alex and he turned toward her now, his eyes hard.

“The planet should thank him for what he’s done. It was population control. It was needed. _Humanity_ should thank him. Perhaps now balance can be restored.”

“Balance,” Alex laughed. “Listen to yourself. Such a load of pretentious shite. What happened to ‘the apocalypse is bad for everyone’?”

“This isn’t the apocalypse,” Hal said. “We were wrong. This isn’t an extinction event. It’s a thinning of the herd, a change in power, nothing more.”

“But we don’t try to fix it?” Tom asked. He didn’t care about herds or balance. He cared about what came next. “We just live with it?”

“We wait for the dust to settle and we see what comes next,” Regus said. 

“That’s what you always do though, isn’t it?” Alex noted. “Oh, you’re the Vampire Recorder. You stand back and observe. That’s all you’ve bloody done for hundreds of years.”

“And for hundreds of years, it’s worked,” Regus returned.

“So that’s it?” Alex concluded. She laughed. It sounded a bit like she was cracking up. “We’re letting vampires take over the world.”

Hal sighed. He glanced at Tom and then he turned back toward the radio.

“It could be worse,” Regus said. He glanced toward Hal as he spoke. “Of all the possible scenarios, I can definitely think of worse.”


	2. Chapter 2

“What do you want?” Hal asked him. He was waiting for Tom to catch his breath. He moved slowly around Tom, half a circle before he turned and came back. “If you could have anything in the world, what would it be?”

“What?” Tom asked. He hadn’t expected Hal to try to start a conversation. That wasn’t how this usually went. He wiped the sweat from his brow. “I don’t know.”

“Yes, you do,” Hal said. “Everyone knows. It’s the very first thing that your heart tells you. You hear the question and you know, right in that moment before you start to think. You know. Anything in the world, Tom. What would it be?” 

Tom shook his head. He should have said Allison. He wanted Allison back. He should have said McNair. He should have said the world, back the way it was before, but none of that was the truth. That wasn’t what he’d felt the moment that Hal asked the question. And Hal must know that. Why else would he even be asking? 

“I want what we had before,” Tom said. “I want what we had when we were human.”

“You had that,” Hal snapped, and Tom looked up. Maybe Hal hadn’t known what he’d answer after all. “You let it go. It wasn’t real.”

“It felt real,” Tom said.

“It was a trick,” Hal said. “It was lies.”

“Okay,” Tom nodded, though he didn’t believe it for a second. “Then I want what Leo had.”

Hal paused, his back to Tom.

“What Leo had,” Hal repeated.

“Yeah,” Tom said. “You and me and Alex. The three of us. That’s it. Supernatural, human, that part don’t matter, as long as it’s us.”

It seemed like he stood there for a long time, but eventually Hal started to shake and then he began to laugh.

“It’s not really funny though, is it,” Tom said. It was sad; it broke Tom’s heart. It definitely wasn’t funny.

“Weren’t you supposed to tell me that you wanted to kill me?” Hal asked. “Wasn’t that your line? I ask you what you want more than anything in the world. You tell me that you want me dead, that you want to drive a stake through my heart. I thought that’s how this was supposed to go, Tom.”

“I thought you wanted me to tell the truth,” Tom returned. “Doesn’t change anything. It doesn’t mean I won’t kill ya. Doesn’t mean I won’t have to.”

“Yes,” Hal agreed. “You told me the truth, and the truth is that you don’t want me dead at all, do you? No, you want me to spend the rest of your life with you.”

“Doesn’t mean I won’t kill ya,” Tom repeated.

Hal nodded and then he turned and walked toward Tom. He came in close and for a moment Tom thought that Hal might kiss him, but he didn’t. He pushed Tom away a little instead, his hand flat against Tom’s chest.

“But you haven’t done it,” Hal said. “You haven’t even come close.”

“I will,” Tom said. Even to his own ears it sounded like he was trying to convince himself. “Doesn’t matter what I want. Doesn’t mean I can have it. That’s not how life works, mate. You taught me that. One of these days I will kill you.”

“One of these days,” Hal smiled. “You really believe that? Because I don’t.”

Tom shrugged.

“Do you know why?”

Probably because now each time Hal kissed Tom, Tom kissed him back. That was probably why, but no way was Tom ever going to say it. He didn’t say anything at all, but it didn’t matter. Hal continued on as though Tom had asked.

“I know you,” Hal said. “And I remember. I remember what you told me of McNair, how you chose to stay with a man who killed your parents and lied to you your entire life. I remember how you nobly talked of self-sacrifice, but then you turned around and handed Eve over to Mr. Snow without so much as a fight. You chose her over humanity, Tom. I remember. You were prepared to let them have the world in exchange for the safety of one baby. And then you saw that paper wolf and you said nothing.”

“Shut up,” Tom said. It was true though, wasn’t it? All of it was true. 

“Somehow you have everyone fooled,” Hal said. “You have Alex fooled. But not me. I see how desperate you truly are.”

He was behind Tom now so Tom couldn’t see his face, but he felt it when Hal reached out and gripped his shoulder, turned Tom toward him.

"Did I ever tell you how I met Leo?" Hal asked.

"I don’t want to know," Tom said. He didn't want to hear about Leo. He didn't want to hear about how different it was. Fifty-five years. He didn't want to feel that jealousy. If Tom had been more like Leo - if Tom had known what to do, if he'd put Hal first. How many years could they have had? 

"I pulled him from a crowd," Hal said. "I threw him in a cage. Dogfights, Tom. Have you heard about the dogfights?"

Hal knew that Tom had. Tom had told Hal all about McNair, and Hal had listened, his mouth a tight line. "I'm sorry," Hal had said at the time. "Tom, I'm sorry." But he hadn't said anything more, not about the fights, not about Leo.

“You were the best friend Leo’d ever had,” Tom said. “I was there. I heard him say it. You said it too.”

“We didn’t know many people,” Hal countered. “It doesn’t change how it all started. It doesn’t change the things that I made him do.”

"Are you trying to get me to stake ya?" Tom asked. “Keep talking. It’s working.” 

“What do you think?” Hal asked. “If I threw you in a cage, what would you do? Would you kill yourself straight off? Or would you kill a couple of them first before you decided you couldn’t bear it any longer? What do you wager?”

Tom was close. Hal was pushing him so close. If he kept talking, Tom knew he’d be able to do it. If Hal kept talking, Tom would stake him. It’d all be over. Tom wasn’t sure if he’d feel grief or relief.

“I could lock you up,” Hal offered then. “A different kind of cage, one with no killing. Not of humans anyway. I could do it for you. Take away the choice. It’d be easier, wouldn’t it? To be able to tell yourself that I forced you to stay? You could have everything you said that you wanted and none of the blame, none of the guilt. Would you like that?”

Tom didn’t respond. He paced back and forth, his hand clenched around the stake.

“You haven’t told Alex, have you?”

“Told her what?” Tom asked.

“Why you can’t kill me,” Hal said. “Why you won’t.”

What a stupid thing to say. For someone so smart, Hal sure could be an idiot sometimes.

“Alex knows all that,” Tom said. Why did Hal think Alex was never here? Why did he think she stayed in the house all the time? She couldn’t do it either.

“Alex,” Hal tsked, shaking his head. “I’m disappointed. I thought that surely if she knew, she’d want a hand in it.”

“It could be like it was,” Tom tried. He had to try, no matter how useless. “We could put you back in the chair. Once we get you off the blood, maybe you would be – it could be like it was before with us.”

“You think that’s how it works?” Hal laughed. “That wasn’t real.”

“But it was a little though, wasn’t it?” Tom said. 

Hal turned away from him and Tom thought that’s it. He must be right. It was a little real. Hal had loved him. Hal had kissed him. He remembered it and that’s why they were here. That’s why they kept coming back to this. Foreplay or whatever it was Hal said before, but this too. This was the heart of it.

“What would you choose?” Tom asked.

“What?”

“If you had the choice, like you said. Anything in the world?”

This time Hal was the one to snap. He came at Tom, punched Tom in the face. He didn’t do that often anymore. Tom wasn’t expecting it. It wasn’t conducive to kissing, a vampire punching a werewolf in the face, and so it took Tom by surprise. He stumbled as the pain spread, as the taste of blood filled his mouth.

Hal never did answer his question.

**

This was how it happened.

While Hetty was busy conquering South America with vampire kindness, Tom, Hal, Alex and Regus returned to Barry, determined to do nothing except wait and see how it all turned out.

Tom went for Hal as soon as they arrived back at the house. He pushed Hal into the front garden, once, then again until Hal stumbled and fell. Tom stood over him, stake held high.

“Wait,” Alex said then and Tom turned, eyebrows raised.

“Wait?” he repeated, but it was too late. He’d given Hal the time he needed and Hal kicked at him, managed to get Tom good so that Tom doubled over and stumbled backward and Hal got back on his feet. 

“You get a choice,” Alex said to Hal. “You agree to go clean again or we stake you here and now.”

Hal turned to Tom, surprised.

“Yeah,” Tom said, improvising. “Yeah, what Alex said.” He wasn’t sure he could really do it anyway. He knew that he should do it. He should hate Hal enough that he could, but it wasn’t like it had been before. His heart wasn’t really in it.

“We stopped you from staking yourself when you wanted to do it,” Alex continued. “We said we were responsible for what happened, so we’re responsible. And we’re giving you a choice. What’s it gonna be?” 

Hal was still staring at Tom and the look on his face still mostly read as disbelief.

“Well?” Alex asked, impatient. She moved to stand beside Tom, her arms folded over her chest, and together they blocked Hal’s path back to his car.

Finally Hal glanced over at Regus – Regus was just standing there, arms raised in surrender – and then Hal started to laugh.

“They really don’t get it, do they?” Hal asked. He turned back to Tom and Alex. “Why would I ever choose you over this?”

Tom shook his head, tightened his grip on the stake. “Eventually you’ll start caring again, won’t ya. That’s how it works, you said. Eventually you’ll want to go back to being good-Hal.”

“Yes,” he said. “Eventually even this will get boring, I suppose. I wouldn’t hold my breath. I doubt you’ll live long enough to see it happen.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Tom asked, steeling himself.

“It wasn’t a threat, Tom,” Hal said. He looked amused, like he sometimes did when Tom said something wrong or stupid. “I meant that you’re mortal. I meant that we’re in a new world now and I imagine life expectancy will be a bit shorter as a result. It’s unlikely, given the circumstances, that you’ll outlive my interest in this. Now, if you’ll excuse me.”

He walked toward them, paused close and waited for them to move aside. Tom shook his head, but Alex pulled him away.

“Regus,” Hal said as he stepped out of the garden and onto the pavement. “I’ll be in the car. If you wish to join me, I expect that you’ll follow.”

“I better go with him,” Regus said, but he didn’t move and after a moment he threw up his hands. “What do you expect me to say? In four hundred years, I’ve never once understood what could compel a vampire to give up blood.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Alex said. “I can think of a few reasons. You know, loyalty, guilt, compassion, love.”

Tom turned to her on that last bit, but Alex was focused on Regus, her arms crossed and her face hard.

“All very noble emotions,” Regus agreed. “But Hal’s right. You lot can’t understand how good it feels. You don’t understand how _easy_ it is to drown it all in blood, to let it change you, to forget everything else. It takes a stronger vampire than I’ve ever been to reject that willingly.”

Hal pressed hard on the car’s horn.

“Well,” Regus said, eyebrows raised. “I’m sure I’ll be in touch. Good luck to you both.”

Once they were gone, Tom turned to Alex. “Why’d we let him go?”

“Would you have been able to kill him?” Alex said. “Because I don’t think I could have.”

**

There was a vampire leaning against the entrance to the front garden. He flicked ash from his cigarette into Annie’s flowers. Tom and Alex stood at the window in Alex’s empty room and stared down at him.

This was the eighth time. Hal was playing with them, that much was clear. He sent his careless vampires to lure them to his desired locations. Alex always refused, stubbornly chose to ignore it, but Tom went. Tom went every time. He killed Hal’s vampires. He threatened to kill Hal. He never followed through.

“We were wrong to let him leave,” Alex said. She followed Tom down the stairs. “We were wrong not to kill him, weren’t we?”

“Yeah,” Tom agreed. He pulled his coat from the stand, shrugged it on as he gathered his stakes and the vials of blood.

Sometimes when Hal kissed him, Tom let it happen. Sometimes he let Hal push him up against something. Hal would move in close, mouth working Tom’s open, and Tom would kiss him back for a few minutes before he tried to bite his own tongue. 

Hal always caught on to that trick before it was too late. He pushed away from Tom, laughed and then made a disapproving noise as he wiped a hand across his mouth. 

The next time Tom tried it again.

**

Alex listened to the news reports and paced the rooms. She didn’t leave much, seemed to prefer the house, though it was full of things that reminded them of Hal.

On the radio Hetty spoke of a union. She spoke of the cohabitation of vampires and werewolves and humans. She spoke of people brought together by the sacrifice of a few. 

It reminded Tom of Allison and he tried to ring her, but she didn’t pick up. 

“Rubbish,” Alex said with disgust – about the news, not about Allison. Tom hadn’t mentioned Allison to her yet. 

So far it was going just like Hal and Regus guessed it would be. People had seen worse, and they knew that they’d been saved from it. Maybe it really would be okay.

“They’re selling photographs of that werewolf, Paulo, at the shop by the café,” Tom noted. “Drawings of Carl too. People are buying them, I seen it. Walking down the pavement staring at their faces. It’s weird.”

“Yeah,” Alex said. “Well, they saved the world, I guess.”

Once the trains started running again she and Tom went to her old house to check on Alex’s family, but they found the house empty and her family gone. Tom knew that if he hadn’t been with her, Alex probably would have faded right then and there. She wouldn’t leave Tom though. She couldn’t, not the way things were.

“Their suitcases are missing,” Alex noted, standing in the middle of her father’s bedroom.

“Maybe they’re still out there somewhere,” Tom said, but it seemed unlikely given the state of things. “Maybe they’re just with relatives or friends or something.”

Alex nodded. “Maybe,” she agreed.

“We’ll look for them,” Tom said. “We’ll find ‘em.”

“And then what?” Alex asked.

Tom knew what it was like, losing a parent, losing a family, but it didn’t make it any easier to help a friend who’d lost hers. Tom didn’t know the right things to say, not like Hal always did. Or like Hal would have if Hal still cared about saying the right things.

“I don’t know,” he admitted. The world was a different place now. It was hard to know the right thing to do, the right course to take. Tom didn’t want to say something wrong.

“I’ve been texting Allison since we got back. I tried to phone her. She hasn’t answered,” Tom said. He thought maybe she was gone. He thought he’d probably never see her again.

Alex reached for him, pulled him into a hug.

They stayed in her house that night. She curled up in her little brother’s bed and after a while Tom climbed in too, curled up around her. It must have been the right thing to do because she pulled his arms closer, her touch cold on his skin. It was different than it had seemed when they thought they were human. She was solid then and warm, but it was the same in some ways too. 

If Tom was honest, it felt a lot like what kept happening with Hal, except nicer.

**

The café was empty and Tom tapped his fingers against the counter. If Hal was there, old Hal, the tapping would have bothered him. He might even have reached out, set a hand over Tom’s to stop Tom from fidgeting. There was no one but Tom at the café now though and his fingers didn’t slow their tapping until his eyes started to drift shut. His arm, the one he was using to prop up his head, slipped and he jerked awake just as the door opened and the bell chimed. 

Tom looked up.

It was Regus, followed closely by Alex.

“See,” Alex said. “Right where I said he’d be.”

“What’s happened?” Tom asked, instantly concerned. He pushed himself off the counter and stood straight, ready for action if needed.

“Alex said I’d find you here,” Regus said. He took a seat at a table close to the counter. He turned to Alex. “And here you are.”

Alex nodded. Tom waited for Regus to continue. Regus came to visit them sometimes, but if he had come searching for Tom, and if Alex had come with him, then it was probably more than a simple visit, wasn’t it?

“Aren’t you going to take my order?” Regus asked eventually.

“Oh,” Tom said. “Oh, right. What would you like?”

Beside Tom, Alex huffed and threw up her hands.

Regus placed his order, making a point to ignore Alex’s frustration. Tom thought they must have gotten into some kind of argument back at the house to explain the way they were acting now. He busied himself making the cheeseburger. Regus refused to talk until Tom was finished, until they were all settled at the table, Regus with his burger in hand.

“Now can we get on with it?” Alex asked.

“Hetty’s been in contact with Hal,” Regus said.

“Is that bad?” Tom asked. He looked to Alex. She shrugged, eyebrows raised.

“It could be,” Regus admitted. “It could be very bad. She’s offered him Europe.”

That didn’t seem like something someone on the other side of the world could really offer, but Tom just nodded, brow furrowed.

“Hal’s going to try to take over Europe,” Tom repeated, trying to get his head around it. That would be it, right? They’d have to kill him now.

“No,” Regus shook his head, he leaned in toward Tom and Alex. He had burger in his mouth and he talked around it as he chewed, his finger jabbing into the table for emphasis. “No, that’s the thing. Hal told her that he didn’t want any part of it. He refused.”

“Huh,” Alex said. “I would have thought he’d be all into world domination now.”

“Can he do that?” Tom asked. He remembered how Hal seemed to crumble when faced with Mr. Snow. He didn’t understand how the Old Ones worked, not really, but they hadn’t seemed like a group that Hal could just refuse.

“Of course he can do that,” Regus said, answering Tom and ignoring Alex. “Hal’s always outranked Hetty. She was upset that he was unwilling to participate, but that should be the end of it. She won’t come for him. There was a time when – she was afraid of him, still is. Hal’s off limits.”

“That’s good then, right?” Tom asked, nodding as he tried to follow.

“That’s good,” Regus said. “But you’re missing the important questions. The important question isn’t whether or not Hal can refuse Hetty’s suggestion. The question is –“ he pointed to Alex with a nod. “Why would he?”

“I dunno,” Tom said. “Why?”

“Don’t know,” Regus shrugged and sat back in his chair, but he was watching Tom closely and Tom thought that maybe Regus knew more than he was saying. “Must have something else in mind.”

**

This was when it started.

Tom was flipping channels on the telly when Hal and Alex came to sit on either side of him. Their postures were rigid, expectant. It was the way Hal sat when he wanted to have a serious discussion, but now, instead of Alex sprawled out beside Tom with her feet up like usual, she had adopted Hal’s posture as well. 

Hal cleared his throat and Tom looked up from the television. He looked from Hal to Alex, then back to Hal again. Hal swallowed, glanced down at his hands where they rested on his thighs. He opened his mouth to speak, and then he shook his head, closed his mouth again.

“What’s wrong?” Tom asked.

Hal responded to his question by looking past Tom to Alex. Alex nodded, eyebrows raised. When Tom frowned at her, she nodded again.

They were being odd about this like they were nervous, which was stupid, because they were probably there to talk to Tom about the fact that he’d forgotten that it was his turn to clean the bathroom or something. That morning Tom had caught Hal and Alex together in the kitchen, huddled together around the table. They’d looked up at him, cheeks red, like he’d caught them doing something they shouldn’t have been. Hal had stumbled over words then, greeted Tom and pulled a little further away from Alex.

Tom had assumed that they were finally working things out between them. Talking about it, maybe planning a date or something. Maybe they thought Tom didn’t know, like he hadn’t noticed the way they were with each other even back before they were human. Like he wasn’t the one who had pushed Hal to phone Alex way back when Alex was human the first time. But the way they were acting now – suddenly it made Tom nervous too, like maybe now that they were here and they could be with each other, they didn’t want Tom there at all anymore. Maybe he was in the way now and they were going to ask him to leave.

It was a stupid fear, really. This was his house too, after all, and these were his best mates, and he was happy for them but he wasn’t going anywhere. And anyway, that didn’t feel right either. It didn’t feel like they wanted him gone. It felt like – it had been feeling more and more like something else, something Tom couldn’t really figure out. Like that feeling that something was coming, something building. He felt it a lot when they were together now, like that night of the full moon when he thought that Hal might try to hold his hand. 

“You’re not kicking me out or nowt, are you?” Tom asked, just to get it out of the way.

Hal’s face went from looking nervous to dead confused, forehead furrowed as he glanced at Alex, then back at Tom, his eyebrows low and his mouth a frown.

“Kick you out?” he repeated. “Why would we kick you out?”

Tom shrugged. “You’re acting all odd,” he said. “More than usual, I mean.”

Hal looked at Alex again and Alex nodded, more emphatically this time, and then she reached out to set a hand on Tom’s knee.

Tom looked down at it. That didn’t make it any less odd.

When Tom looked up, Hal was looking at Alex’s hand on Tom’s knee too. He cleared his throat again.

“God, Hal, will you just say it already?” Alex asked. “I offered to do the talking and you insisted it had to be you, but if you’re just going to sit there like a – like – “ She closed her eyes, and when she couldn’t find the word she was looking for, she groaned in frustration and shook her head.

“Tom,” Hal said quickly, as though he was afraid Alex really might try to do the talking in his place. “As you probably know, Alex and I sat down this morning and had a conversation regarding our –”

“Mutual attraction,” Alex supplied.

Hal shook his head. “Our feelings for each other,” he amended.

“All right,” Tom said, still unsure of where this was going.

“And during the discussion it was suggested that perhaps whatever might be between us, isn’t exclusively between us.”

“Okay,” Tom said. Then he actually listened to what Hal was saying. “What?” Beside him Alex groaned again and her fingers curled into Tom’s knee a little, clutching. He could tell that the claws were meant for Hal.

“What he’s trying to say is – “

“Alex,” Hal cut in. “Please.” He shut his eyes for a long moment after that during which Tom, still confused, turned to look at Alex. She smiled at him and nodded.

“What I’ve been ineloquently attempting to explain,” Hal resumed. “Is that I’ve – we’ve – come to the realization that some of our feelings are for you as well. And if you thought that those were feelings that you might return, then perhaps this is something that we should explore together. The three of us.”

Tom took in Hal’s words, thought about them, and then shook his head. “No, I still don’t understand what you’re trying to say.”

Finally Hal seemed to give up and turned to Alex for help, his eyebrows raised.

“He’s asking if we can…court you,” Alex said and she sounded genuine, though she made a face at the word, like it tasted really bad in her mouth. It wasn’t one she ever would have used on her own. Hal looked pained by her delivery.

Tom smiled, thinking suddenly that it must be a joke. They were trying to pull one over on him.

“Court me?” he repeated. “What, the two of you?”

“If you’re interested,” Hal nodded, completely serious.

Tom felt his smile falter a little. Hal didn’t look like he thought it was a joke.

“Oh no,” Alex breathed beside him.

“You’re serious?” Tom asked. “You’re really asking me if I want – if I – the three of us? Together?”

Alex removed her hand from Tom’s knee. Hal started to backtrack. “If we’ve misjudged then I apologize. I thought – “

Tom turned away from them both. He stared straight ahead, focused on nothing at first, then on the mantel, on the objects that he’d placed there, reminders of the people that had come before them. He’d gathered the objects himself, arranged them lovingly. 

He remembered how it was when he first met George and Nina. He’d never met anyone like Nina. He thought he’d loved her. He’d been sure of it. 

Maybe we both love her? That’s what he’d suggested to George, wasn’t it? Maybe we both love her and that’s what makes us a pack. 

And maybe that’s what this was now. Maybe that’s what had been building between them. It was weird, that was true, and Tom was pretty sure that what Hal and Alex were suggesting wasn’t normal at all, but now that he was being asked, he thought it would be lying to say that he didn’t feel some of those feelings too. Maybe they loved him. He thought that maybe he loved them too. Maybe that’s what made them a pack.

“You’re serious?” Tom asked again. He had to be sure.

“I’m serious,” Alex said. They both turned to Hal. 

When Hal looked back at him, it was the same look as when they stood together in the café. The same look as when Hal told Tom that he was one of the most remarkable people that Hal had ever met. It had been uncomfortable then, it had made Tom’s chest feel fluttery and tight, and Tom had had to look away. He’d had to brush Hal off. 

Now the look made Tom’s chest feel fluttery and tight, but Tom didn’t look away. He didn’t brush it off. “Hal?”

Hal’s eyes moved as though he was searching for the right words, and then he found them and he spoke.

“Whatever happens, it would be incomplete without you.”

**

Regus returned a few days after the meeting at the café and found them both at the house. Tom stepped aside and let Regus enter. 

He had more news, but he refused to tell them until after Alex had offered tea. When she handed it to him, he took a sip, screwed up his face, and said, “I miss that Annie.”

“Okay,” Alex said. She took the cup from his hands and set it on the table. “Out with it.” 

“There’s a werewolf couple in Italy that are starting to make noise. They’re gathering wolves and they have quite a following already thanks to Paulo’s sacrifice.”

“So,” Alex shrugged. “Weren’t you the one who told us there was nothing to be done? Just wait and see, that’s what you said, right?”

“Listen,” Regus said. “You asked me to keep you informed. I’m keeping you informed. The werewolves are making Hetty nervous.”

“What about Hal?” Tom asked.

“Hal seems even less interested than you two,” Regus admitted.

“Why doesn’t Hetty just send someone else to Italy if she’s so concerned?” Tom asked. “There are loads of vampires out there. There must be some others that want control.”

“Of course,” Regus said with a shrug. “But you have to understand. None of them are Hal.”

**

Tom found Alex on the floor of her empty room. It had started out empty because Alex didn’t think she was staying, because Tom didn’t like the reminder that Annie and Eve had left them, so when Hal was strapped to the chair, he and Alex had moved Annie’s furniture up to the attic. It wasn’t officially Alex’s room then. Alex didn’t think she needed a room at all, but she liked the space, the emptiness of it, and eventually Tom came to think of it as hers. 

“Didn’t you have furniture growing up?” Tom asked her once, confused. He thought it was probably because he hadn’t really had a lot of furniture growing up. He didn’t understand why you wouldn’t want any if you had the choice.

“Of course I did,” Alex said. “But I don’t really need it now, do I?’

“I suppose you don’t,” Tom had agreed.

Even now there were magazines scattered around the floor, a radio, but nothing else. 

Tom came into the room and sprawled out on the floor beside Alex. He folded his hands over his stomach and stared up at the ceiling.

“No one ever mentions the ghost in all of this. Have you noticed that?” Alex asked. He turned his head to look at her profile.

She puffed up her chest in what Tom assumed was supposed to be an imitation of Regus. “’The details will fall into place eventually.’ If your job title was Vampire Recorder, isn’t that something you would ask? When this vampire Carl phones you and asks for help, while you’re telling him about that blood spell, wouldn’t you say, hey, I’m going to record this for history because that’s what I do, I’m the Vampire Recorder. How ‘bout you tell me the names of your trinity, huh? Isn’t that the kind of question he should be asking?”

“Yeah,” Tom agreed.

“He’s the cocking Vampire Recorder!”

“Alex –“

“I just think the ghost deserves a little credit here too, you know?”

“Yeah,” Tom said. “Yeah.”

“I was so sure that defeating Hatch, defeating the fucking _Devil_ was my unfinished business,” Alex said. “I was positive. We’d defeat Hatch and that would be it. And then we did, and we were all together. We were _human_ and I thought, that was it, you know? I had passed over and you were both there and maybe it wasn’t the real you or the real Hal, but we were together. I could have the two of you and my family. That was my heaven. If I had to choose, that was it.”

“Alex,” Tom started.

“And then we woke up in that fucking cell and some other ghost stole my unfinished business, and no one even knows the ghost’s name! No one remembers them. They’re nothing in all of this. I would have been nothing.”

“It wasn’t your unfinished business, though, was it?” Tom said. “It couldn’t have been. Not since you’re still here and all. It must be something else.”

“I guess it must be,” Alex sighed.

She stopped talking then, just paused and stared up at the ceiling for a while. Tom rolled onto his side, hand propped under his head as he continued to look at her. He looked at her face now, sad and hard, and he remembered the way she’d looked when they were human. He remembered the way she’d looked at him. Eventually she turned her head. He tried smiling at her, but she didn’t return the smile. Instead she said, “So why do you think Hal isn’t trying to take over?”

“I don’t know,” Tom shrugged. “It must be like Regus said. Hal must have something else in mind. You heard him, said Hal seemed bored by it.”

Alex was nodding but she kept watching Tom, and Tom started to feel like Alex was looking for something, feeling him out. 

“What’s Hal doing though?” Alex asked, searching Tom’s face. “It seems like all he’s doing is fighting with you. There must be more to it than that.”

Tom shifted, rolled back onto his back, stared straight up.

“Maybe he’s already getting tired of it,” Tom suggested. “Maybe he’s changing his mind.”

Alex sighed.

“I don’t know, Tom. Regus said it was something else, yeah, but something else could mean anything. It could mean those dogfights you told me about. It might mean his own war. It might still mean King Hal of the entire bloody world in the end for all we know.”

“It could mean us,” Tom said.

Alex reached out to set her palm to his cheek. She did it in that way that reminded him that she still thought of him as a child sometimes, as a younger sibling, even after everything that had happened.

“You have to stop letting him mess with your head,” Alex said. “You have to stop meeting with him.”

Tom shook his head. He wasn’t going to stop meeting Hal and he wasn’t going to lie to Alex and say that he was.

“You see what he’s doing, don’t you?” Alex asked. “Do you know what Regus said to me before we came and found you at the café that day?”

“What?” Tom asked, sure suddenly that he didn’t really want to know.

“He said that Hal brought him along once. He said that he stood out of sight and watched the two of you. He watched you kill those vampires, Tom. He saw the way that – that Hal kissed you afterward. He said it looked like a reward for a job well done.”

Tom shook his head. That wasn’t how it went. Regus interpreted it wrong. That wasn’t it at all.

“He’s testing you, grooming you. Regus says you’re the most lethal werewolf he’s ever seen.”

“No,” Tom said.

“He told me that if he thought you had any reason to come after him, he’d be in Russia by now, Hal be damned.” 

“You really think that’s what he’s doing?” Tom asked, turning to her. “You believe Regus. You think that’s what this is?”

“I don’t know,” Alex admitted. “I just think you should know that it’s possible that Hal does have a plan, one that he hasn’t let on yet. One that we aren’t going to like.”

Tom turned away from Alex, pushed himself up off the floor. He rubbed a hand over his head and paced the empty room. 

“McNair used to warn me about vampires like Hal,” Tom admitted. “They have all the time in the world and if they got bored, they might decide to play with you. They might spend years trying to mess with your head. He said the dogfights were like that. They messed with your head and your heart. They could rot a werewolf slow-like, so he might not even know it was happening until it was too late.”

“You think that’s what Hal’s doing?” Alex asked, surprised. “Playing with us?”

“I dunno. It might just be an evening’s entertainment to Hal,” Tom said. McNair's voice echoed in his head. 

“Tom,” Alex said. She was standing now too, and she reached for Tom, but he brushed her off.

“I’m not Hal’s henchman. I’m not that wolf Milo. If that’s what this is, grooming me for some kind of war, then we stake him,” Tom concluded. “We’ll have to stake him.”


	3. Chapter 3

It would be incomplete without you.

Hal had said it before in relation to Tom and Alex. He’d said it right after they’d defeated Hatch. But this was different. This meant something different.

Tom thought – no one had ever said anything like that to him before. Not like that. Tom felt it in his heart and his stomach and even a little below that. He felt his face get hot and he turned away from Hal, turned to look back at Alex. It seemed safer. She smiled and nodded, leaned in and kissed his cheek.

He felt Hal’s hand on his shoulder then, fingers settling on his chin and turning Tom back toward him. Tom followed Hal’s touch, and when he turned, he saw that Hal was closer, that the look in his eyes was the same, but different. It seemed more sure now, more focused. And when his eyes fell to look at Tom’s mouth, leaving no mistake as to what his intentions were, Tom’s intake of breath was loud to his own ears.

Hal moved in, slow, deliberate. He was giving Tom time to process, time to think and to pull away. When he was close, only inches away, his eyes flicked back up to meet Tom’s again.

“Tom,” he said, his voice soft. “I’m going to kiss you.”

“All right,” Tom breathed.

Hal’s eyes fell shut. His eyelids were shiny, Tom noted, and then he was done with such details, because Hal closed the space between them and his lips met Tom’s in a kiss. 

Kissing Allison had been new and really nice and kissing Natasha had been exciting, but kissing Hal was – he thought that was it. He hadn’t really understood before, but it all clicked into place when Hal kissed him. His heart raced and tightened. His stomach fluttered. Hal’s mouth was soft against his, slow, and then he felt Hal’s tongue and he thought it should be gross, but it wasn’t. It really wasn’t. And Tom reached for Hal, pulled him closer.

“Oh,” Alex said beside them, breathy and quiet. 

It was only later, when they’d decided that they should take things slow and everything had become awkward with the possibility of more, that Tom caught himself thinking about it again. He passed Alex in the corridor and they skirted by each other, Tom smiling and blushing, and Alex laughed and rolled her eyes, reached out to touch his arm. Once he was past her, he turned the corner and there it was again. The mantelpiece with all of the things he’d placed there. 

It was supposed to be nice. It was supposed to be a tribute. That was what Tom had intended when he’d gone up to the attic to find the box that he knew Annie had kept. She’d been sentimental like that. She and Tom were alike in that way. 

The box was in Tom’s room now, under the bed next to the box that held the things that Tom kept of McNair’s. There were only a few things in Annie’s box now. Most of them were things that Tom didn’t understand, things that he’d never seen, that he hadn’t been a part of. And then there was the folded paper wolf. He’d left it out for a few days, but after that he put it back there, hid it away. It bothered him to look at it. He thought it was probably time to look at it again.

**

“I know what this is,” Tom said, his hands tight around his stakes. Three vampires this time. They’d been hard to kill; they’d known things, fought dirty. By the time the last one fell into dust, Tom was tired and angry and annoyed. He wasn’t bleeding though, and when Hal came at him, all Tom could think was that this would be his reward. He’d staked Hal’s vampires and this was all that he would get in return. 

“I would have expected that you’d catch on by now,” Hal agreed, though Hal didn’t sound like he understood what Tom was getting at. Not really. 

“I know what you’re doing,” Tom said again. “And I’m done playing along.”

“What am I doing?” Hal asked. Tom had his attention now. Hal was unarmed and he held up his hands to demonstrate as he stepped closer to Tom.

“You’re testing me,” Tom said, eyebrows raised. “Training me. Well, I won’t be part of it anymore. I won’t help you win your war.”

“My war?” Hal repeated. His hands fell back to his sides and his brow furrowed in confusion. “I’m not part of any – is that what Regus thinks? He told you that?”

“He didn’t need to tell me,” Tom said. It was only a partial lie. He’d heard it from Alex after all, not Regus. “It don’t matter how I know. I won’t help you fight those werewolves in Italy, or that vampire Hetty neither.”

Hal laughed and it almost sounded affectionate. Tom could see Hal’s eyes shining with it and he was pretty sure he’d never been more confused.

“That’s what you think?” Hal asked. “Oh, Tom. You know what they say. Not my circus, not my monkey.”

“Who said owt about monkeys?”

“I mean that the werewolves, Hetty, even Regus. Their problems are not my problem.”

“Oh,” Tom said. “You should have just said that then.”

Hal was laughing again.

“I’m testing you, yes,” Hal agreed once he’d gotten himself under control, though a smile still lingered at his lips. “But not for any war. I’m testing you because it pleases me. I do it because I like watching you. You’re feral, efficient, beautiful and dangerous. And it turns me on. It gets me off. Do you know what I do each time that you leave?”

Tom shook his head. He wasn’t sure that he really wanted to know.

“I brace myself against the nearest wall, and then I pleasure myself, urgent and desperate. Sometimes the release hits me so hard that my knees buckle and I slide to the floor, gasping for breath. Can you picture that? Do you see why I bring us back to this again and again? Hetty, the werewolves – they can have the fucking world. What would I want with it?”

“You’re lying,” Tom said. There had to be more to it. What was the point?

“Do you know how old those vampires were that you killed tonight?” Hal asked. “I stopped bringing you new vampires weeks ago. They were too easy for you. There was no challenge. That’s what I love, Tom. Watching you rise to the challenge.” Hal kicked at a pile of dust and a leather jacket. “Sixty years old.” He pointed to the smear of dust on the far wall, the jeans and t-shirt strewn on the floor. “Eighty. And the one at your feet? He was one hundred and seventy five years old.”

Hal had been moving closer as he spoke until he was standing directly in front of Tom. He raised his eyebrows as he reached out and carefully wrapped a hand around Tom’s wrist, slid the stake from his grasp. 

Tom let him do it, let him think it was going to be that easy. He listened to the stake hit the floor when Hal dropped it. It bounced twice and then rolled away. When Hal reached for Tom’s other hand, Tom pulled back, stepped aside, and then shoved Hal forward. Hal caught his footing and swung back around easily, but Tom was ready for him. He dodged Hal once, twice, and then he grabbed for Hal, tried to bring up his stake, but Hal knocked it from his hand, grabbed his wrist and held on tight. Tom shouted and pushed Hal back until he had Hal up against a fence partition.

Hal stopped fighting them. He let his grip on Tom’s wrist relax, his other palm flat against Tom’s chest.

“Do you want to know why I do it?” Hal asked.

Tom paused, just long enough for Hal to get the upper hand again. Hal’s hand tightened around Tom’s wrist and he turned it, and then he pushed Tom’s open palm against the front of Hal’s trousers.

Tom struggled, but then stopped and watched as Hal’s eyes fell shut and his hips pressed forward against Tom’s hand. Hal’s mouth was open and Tom heard his intake of breath.

“You see?” Hal asked.

He pressed Tom’s hand against him, pressed in pulses, slow and rhythmic, and Tom could feel it. He could feel how hard Hal was beneath his hand. Tom let his fingers curl around Hal, just a little. He couldn’t stop looking at Hal’s face, at the way his eyelids fluttered and his mouth fell slack. Each breath that Hal took shook and shuddered from his lips. Hal’s eyebrows pulled together and his forehead creased and a small moan let loose from his throat.

Tom rubbed his hand against Hal, watched how Hal’s face changed. He felt Hal press back against his palm, heard the rattle of the fencing as they moved.

Tom wanted nothing more right then than to kiss Hal. He wanted to taste Hal’s mouth on his. He wanted to lean in and press his mouth to Hal’s lower lip. 

He didn’t. He couldn’t stop watching long enough to act. He was transfixed. 

Hal’s breath came heavier now, his hips meeting Tom’s hand in a rhythm that Tom easily matched.

And then Hal opened his eyes. He looked right back at Tom and Tom felt his heart jump, felt it start to race in his chest. Hal smiled. His eyes flicked down to glance between them. Tom followed his look, saw what Hal saw. Hal’s hand had fallen away from Tom’s, was pressed back against the fence. He no longer held Tom to him at all, but Tom had not pulled away, had continued what Hal had forced him to start. 

Even now Tom didn’t want it to stop, but Hal was smiling at him, smug and knowing, and Tom pulled away, stepped back and turned. He tried to compose himself. He was angry and frustrated. He felt tricked and he clenched his fist, thought really hard about punching the smug smile from Hal’s face. He wondered if it would make him feel any better at all.

Tom couldn’t stay. This wasn’t how he wanted it to go. If this was how it went then that was it. Hal won.

Hal’s hand was on himself now, picking up where Tom had left off, watching Tom, his eyes dark.

Tom regarded Hal, let himself watch for just a moment, but when Hal started to pull at the buckle of his belt, Tom shook his head. He had to get out before it went any further.

“You’re pathetic,” Tom concluded, and with that he left.

**

He was sitting on the edge of Hal’s bed when Alex found him, the photograph of Leo in his hand.

His eyes were closed, so he didn’t notice her at first. He was picturing the wall of his room, the clippings that he’d hung above the mantel there. He pictured the smiling couples, the families, the moments that were so important, all the moments that Tom had missed.

He’d never have most of those things with Hal or with Alex. He’d probably never have most of those moments at all.

“Tom?” Alex asked. “What are you doing in here?”

Tom opened his eyes, looked up at her and shrugged. “Nothing,” he said. “I was just thinking.”

“Yeah?” She smiled and reached out to touch his shoulder. “Do you want to talk about it?”

Tom looked down at the picture of Leo.

“Do you know, a while back I was thinking about my birthday. And suddenly I thought that that probably wasn’t my real birthday at all. How would McNair have known? He wasn’t there. My whole life I’ve thought I was born on a certain day and I probably wasn’t born then at all, was I? Could’ve been any day. Could be today.”

“I guess it could be,” Alex agreed slowly. “Happy birthday?”

Tom nodded.

“Doesn’t feel like it was today,” Tom said after a moment. “But thanks for that.”

Alex sat beside him on the bed, took the photograph from Tom’s hand. She raised her eyebrows and turned it toward him.

“Do you want to talk about this?” She asked next.

“I was just thinking,” Tom said. “You know, about how Leo was able to keep Hal good for all those years.”

“And about how we weren’t,” Alex guessed, finishing the thought for him.

Tom shrugged. Yeah, that was it exactly. That was always it. If Tom had been Leo, then maybe Hal would be here with them now. If Tom had been Leo, maybe none of this would have happened.

“Did you know how they met, Hal and Leo? Hal caught him, locked him up and made him fight. Guess Hal was into the dogfights then. He might have been running them. I don’t really know.”

Alex took this in, and then she set Leo’s picture on the table beside Hal’s bed. 

“Come on,” she said. She pulled until Tom stopped resisting, until they were both lying back on Hal’s bed. The bed was small and Alex’s arm overlapped Tom’s, her elbow resting on his chest. She folded her hands across her stomach and then turned to look at Tom.

“Can I tell you something?” she asked. 

“Yeah,” Tom said.

“Sometimes I think Hal’s probably my unfinished business.”

“What?” Tom asked. “Like staking him?”

“I don’t know,” Alex said. “Maybe. It would make sense, wouldn’t it? It wasn’t Cutler and it wasn’t Hatch or Rook and it wasn’t any of the things on my list. What’s left except Hal?”

Tom shook his head. “Can’t be,” he said.

“Why not?”

“You’d have to kill me too then, wouldn’t ya?”

“I’m not saying I’m going to run out and push a stake into his heart tomorrow,” Alex clarified. “I’m not going anywhere.”

“No,” Tom said. “I mean, if Hal’s responsible then I’m responsible too.”

“Look, I know that we said that we were taking responsibility for Hal, but –“

“You don’t know?” Tom asked. “He never told ya?”

“Told me what?”

“I made him go on that date so I could get closer to Allison. Hal was dead scared of you, but I thought it would be good for him, you know, being human like, courting and that. I promised I’d keep him safe and I broke that promise, but he was okay then. He didn’t do nothing. He said he just ran away from you. But I didn’t stop. I pushed some more and got him to phone you again, dialed the number myself and everything. That makes it just as much me, don’t it? That makes you being here just as much my fault as Hal’s. So if it’s Hal, I’m your unfinished business too then.”

Alex was quiet for a long time. Finally she said, “Then I guess it must be something else.”

**

Tom woke up alone in Hal’s bed.

“Alex?” he asked. He wasn’t that surprised that she was gone. After all, she couldn’t sleep, so she was just lying there with him, staring at the ceiling, staring at Hal’s abandoned belongings. It wasn’t healthy, them coming in here like this. They should be moving on from this. They should move all of Hal’s furniture up to the attic with Annie’s and Eve’s, with the boxes of George’s and Mitchell’s and Nina’s things. That’s what they did when the house lost someone. They built shrines of piled furniture and belongings in the attic and then they watched them collect dust.

Tom turned and his eye caught on Leo’s picture again. Tom thought he understood now. He understood the routines and the rules and the lists. It didn’t matter. He’d taken too long to get it.

There was a noise downstairs.

“Alex?” Tom called again. He stood and slipped out into the corridor.

He was on the stairs when he heard Hal’s voice and he rushed down the last few steps and burst into the room.

Hal looked up from where he sat on the brown sofa, eyebrows raised.

“Tom,” he said in greeting.

“Hal was just leaving,” Alex said, her voice odd. She was just standing there, her arms folded across her chest. She didn’t have a stake. Hal didn’t seem worried that he might be staked. Hal seemed relaxed, actually, and Tom guessed that that was probably the part that bothered Alex the most.

“You invited him in?” Tom asked, surprised.

“I didn’t have to,” Alex said. “It’s still his home.”

Hal cut in. “It wouldn’t matter if it was. When you’re an Old One, an invitation doesn’t have an expiration date.”

“That’s convenient,” Tom said.

“Yes,” Hal agreed. He smiled at Tom.

“Tomorrow we’re changing the locks,” Alex added.

“But what’s he doing here?” Tom asked. “What are you doing here?”

“Oh,” Hal said. His eyebrows rose as he looked at Alex. “She hasn’t told you about our meetings, I take it.”

Alex closed her eyes and shook her head. “This isn’t a meeting. When you just walk into someone’s house without being invited, it’s not a meeting. It’s trespassing.”

“What?” Tom asked. “You’ve been meeting up with each other? Here?”

“Don’t listen to him,” Alex said, but Tom was listening. He was listening and he knew what Hal was doing. He knew that Hal had said it like that because he was trying to get them angry with each other, jealous or something, but Tom didn’t feel angry or jealous. He felt surprised, but mostly he felt…relieved. He felt relieved knowing that it wasn’t just him, that Alex couldn’t help herself either.

“Alex isn’t quite as easy as you are,” Hal said as he stood from the sofa. “It’s been a bit of a challenge, hasn’t it, Alex? Fun, though.”

Tom looked to Alex and she shook her head. Tom started to make his way behind the sofa toward the coat stand. There was a stake in the pocket of his coat. A stake and a vial of his blood.

“Did Alex tell you she reckons she’s figured out her unfinished business?” Tom asked. He wasn’t sure why he said it. He hadn’t planned it. He just needed to say something distracting.

“Tom –“ Alex started surprised.

“No,” Hal turned to Alex. “She hasn’t said. Does that mean you’ll be leaving us soon?”

“Maybe,” Tom answered for Alex. “But so will you. Alex’s unfinished business is killing you.”

Hal laughed. “That’s what you think now, is it?”

Alex shrugged. “Why not?” She asked. “It’d be a service to the world. Should earn me a door, right?”

Tom reached into the pocket of his coat, pulled out the stake, the feel of it familiar in his hand. Hal wasn’t paying attention to him now. He was watching Alex with a small smile on his face, like he was enjoying this. Really enjoying it.

“She’s right,” Tom said. 

“Probably,” Hal agreed with a little nod. “She thought she was probably right when her unfinished business was killing the Devil too. She thought she was right when she wrote that ridiculous list. But yes, killing me would make some degree of sense. Not that these things ever seem to make much sense in the end.”

“You aren’t worried?” Tom asked.

“Why should I be worried? You’ve been threatening to stake me for weeks, but you haven’t done it. Alex hasn’t even bothered to threaten. She didn’t say a word about it until you came down the stairs. In fact, we were having a…stimulating discussion about something else entirely.”

Tom raised his eyebrows at Alex, and then he tossed her the stake. She caught it, ready, and held it high.

“You don’t think I’ll do it?” she asked. 

“Not really,” Hal shrugged.

“Maybe she won’t stake you now,” Tom agreed. “But someday she’ll get bored. She’ll want to get out of here and pass over. And then she’ll come for you.”

“And you’ll be left all alone,” Hal said. “You think I believe that you’ll let that happen? That you won’t fight tooth and nail to keep us here with you, greater good be damned?”

“Shut up,” Alex said. “Don’t you ever just shut up?”

“Well,” Hal sighed. He glanced at his watch. “It seems you and Tom have some things to discuss, so I’ll bid you farewell.” He moved in close to Alex, gently pushed the stake away from his chest, and then leaned in and kissed her cheek. 

“We’ll be in touch,” he said, and even Tom thought he heard the double meaning in Hal’s tone. 

Tom caught Alex’s eye, and she stared back at him, her mouth open just slightly. He wondered suddenly if they could force Hal. He wondered if they could knock him out, restrain him and starve him. He wondered if that would even work, if you could really starve the evil from a vampire.

Probably not. Hal probably had to want it. 

Hal reached out and touched Tom’s neck as he passed him. It was a caress, no mistake, and when Hal’s hand started to fall away, Tom reached for it and grabbed his wrist.

“Tom,” Hal warned, eyebrows raised.

They all stood there for a long moment, frozen, and then Tom spoke.

“Fifty-five years is a long time.” He released Hal’s hand. 

“Yes,” Hal paused. “It is.”

“Do you think we would have been together that long?” Tom asked. “If things had gone different, I mean.”

Hal opened his mouth and Tom braced himself. He knew Hal’s response was going to be mean, nasty. He knew he shouldn’t have said anything at all, should have kept the thought to himself, let it go, but – 

“I don’t know,” Hal said. “Even if you and Annie and Alex had held me more consistently to Leo’s same rigid set of rules, I don’t know that I could have lasted no matter how much I would have wanted to.”

Tom looked up, surprised.

“You did want to, then?” Tom asked. 

“I did,” Hal said, holding Tom’s gaze as he said it. Tom shifted, suddenly self-conscious, and then he looked down at his feet and shook his head.

When he looked up again, Hal was gone, the door falling shut behind him. 

Alex groaned and collapsed onto the sofa.

"What is it about him?" she asked.

Tom moved away from the door, came to sit down beside her.

"What is it that creates such blind loyalty in those around him?" she clarified. "He certainly doesn't do anything to earn it. Not really. A small thing here and there, a fucking kind word, but in the grand scheme? He doesn't deserve it. I mean, look at Leo. He turned Leo into a murderer, Tom, and then Leo chose to stay with Hal for over 55 years! How does he do it? How does he get us to overlook every horrible thing that he's done and still want to help him? Why do we _want_ him?"

"I don't know," Tom said. He didn’t know. He just knew that he did.

"Well," Alex sighed. "I guess you don't get to be 500 bloody years old without learning a few things about manipulating people."

“Why didn’t you say that you’d seen him?” Tom asked. “You could’ve told me.”

“I don’t know,” Alex said. “I was – I was mad at myself, and I was a little traumatized? I killed three vampires. I saw one of them on the corner while you were off working your shift, and I followed him, because – well, because of what Regus said, about Hal training you for something, for some kind of war. I was going to confront him, tell him to fuck off. And he was there with three vampires and I – I staked them.”

“That’s good,” Tom said. “Three less vampires.”

“I’ve never killing anything before. Not a thing, and you know what?” Alex said. “You were right. It was easy.” She laughed, but it wasn’t the happy kind of laugh.

“I always thought that I was a better person than this, you know? I thought I was the type of person who would have walked away from this, but I’m not, am I? I’m still here.”

“What happened after you staked the vampires? What did Hal do then?”

“I don’t know,” Alex said. “Hal started clapping and for a moment, I thought I could do it. I could drive that stake right though his heart. I didn’t. I rentaghosted home and I left him there. But he showed up when you were gone during your last change, and then again just now.” 

An evening’s entertainment. Sometimes Tom still wondered if McNair was right and that was all this was in the end.

"Do you think you’d really do it?" Tom asked. "If you think he is your unfinished business, could you kill Hal?"

“I don’t think I can,” she said. “I don’t even know if I want to. Do you?”

Tom shook his head. He thought he was probably done lying about it now, at least to himself. “No.”

“So then what do we do?”

**

Tom pressed one hand against the wall, leaned against it, tried to catch his breath. Ten vampires. He’d never taken out that many in one go before. His heart was pounding in his chest, his breath came heavy and fast. His arm was bleeding. He could feel it. Tomorrow he’d be able to count the bruises.

He heard Hal move behind him and he knew he should turn. Hal could kill him now if he wanted to, here with his back turned. He was vulnerable and dead exhausted. 

He didn’t really think that Hal wanted him dead. 

“Give me a minute,” Tom said, but Hal didn’t stop. He kept coming closer. Hal was right behind Tom now, and when he leaned in Tom felt Hal’s breath, hot on the back of his neck. Tom turned his head, and then Hal had a hold of his good arm, the one that hadn’t been cut. He yanked at it, pulled Tom away from the wall, and then pushed hard so that Tom was back up against it.

Tom braced himself, arms up, but Hal didn’t want that. He wasn’t looking for another fight. He knocked Tom’s arms aside, slid his hands up Tom’s neck to cradle his face, and then he kissed him, mouth sliding over Tom’s and tongue pressing in, indecent and exciting and wrong.

Hal kissed Tom and Tom tasted blood on his tongue. It had been a hard fight, ten vampires, at least one of them had punched Tom in the face. It might be his blood in his mouth, and he started and tried to push away from Hal.

“No, don’t,” Hal said. He released Tom's face and gripped his arms instead, pulled Tom back in, kissed his cheek before he found Tom’s mouth again.

So not Tom’s blood then.

Hal’s tongue pressed into Tom’s mouth and it felt lewd the way he lapped at Tom, the way his thigh pushed up at Tom’s groin. Tom tried to take a step back, get a little more space between them, but Hal moved with him, his hand falling to Tom’s waist and pulling him in again.

Hal probably got off on this, his blood in Tom’s mouth. Tom could still taste it just a little as Hal kissed him. It probably excited Hal, probably explained the noises that Hal was making and the way that he was moving against Tom.

Tom reached up and pulled at Hal’s coat, his hands twisted into fists, even as Hal pulled at Tom, holding them closer still. 

It was Hal who broke the kiss suddenly and pushed Tom back, pinning him harder against the wall. Tom tried to catch his breath, but he didn’t have time, Hal was on him again, his hands pushing up beneath Tom’s shirt, his mouth at Tom’s neck.

He was probably thinking about ripping Tom’s throat out, Tom thought, but the thought wasn’t serious, not serious enough that he wasn’t enjoying Hal’s lips on him, Hal’s mouth sucking at him. 

“I can smell how desperate you are,” Hal said, his mouth forming the words against Tom’s skin.

“Tomorrow night’s the full moon,” Tom explained. He was sure that Hal already knew.

“You reek of it,” Hal gasped, but his words were muffled, his face pressed to Tom’s skin. His hands were still under Tom’s shirt, touching his sides, his back. Tom thought back to a time when Hal didn’t want to touch him at all, recoiled at an outstretched hand. It seemed a little funny now that touching him was all Hal ever seemed to want to do.

Hal slipped a hand out from beneath Tom’s shirt. It slid up Tom’s shoulder and then curled around the side of Tom’s neck. Hal could snap it if he wanted to. He could hold Tom there, bring his other hand up, and snap Tom’s neck good and proper. It’d be over in an instant. Tom might not even be able to move fast enough to stop it. 

“You don’t seem to mind, mate,” Tom noted. Hal didn’t seem like he was really interested in snapping Tom’s neck.

“It’s sickening,” Hal said, but the word was hardly out of Hal’s throat before his mouth was on Tom’s again, kissing over Tom’s lips. 

Tom felt his shoulders push against the wall behind him, his hips pressing forward against Hal’s. Hal moved and the next time Tom pressed forward, he was up against Hal’s thigh. Hal’s hand on Tom’s back felt hot and firm, holding Tom closer, and Tom moaned low into Hal’s mouth.

Tom felt a rush of air then, cool on his face, and he opened his eyes. Alex was there, standing right behind Hal. Tom started, but Alex shook her head, held up a hand. 

He wasn’t sure what she was doing there, but he understood that. Don’t let on. Hal was still kissing him, his mouth at Tom’s cheek, his jaw, then back to his mouth. Hal’s fingertips slid back beneath the top of Tom’s shorts, pressed against the lowest part of Tom’s back.

Tom tried to watch Alex. He saw her lift her hand, quiet and careful. She didn’t have a stake, just her empty hand, palm open. It hovered right behind Hal until finally, Alex shut her eyes and moved forward and her hand pressed to the back of Hal’s head.

Tom felt Hal feel it as soon as it happened. He felt Hal falter, and then Hal kissed Tom one more time. Tom could tell he was pretending, could feel Hal calculating his next move, but before Tom could think what to do, Hal’s mouth was gone from his, the hand that was behind Tom’s neck gone too. He still had Tom, his arm wrapped around Tom’s waist, fingers pressing into Tom’s skin, but he’d turned and in his other hand, Hal held Alex’s wrist.

They stared at each other for a moment, frozen, the three of them. 

Tom could hear the heavy sounds of his own breathing as he watched. And then, finally, Hal yanked at Alex’s wrist and she jerked forward into him. Tom reached out to steady her and just as she found her footing, Hal leaned in and kissed her, pressed his mouth hard to hers. 

Alex was quick. She shoved him away and Hal’s arm that still held Tom dropped too.

Alex looked to Tom and then she was gone, her eyes squeezed shut as she disappeared.

Hal looked up at Tom and Tom thought that even Hal looked a little stunned.

“That was new,” Hal said.


	4. Chapter 4

This was how it ended.

“How long have you known?” Hal asked in the dark of Tom’s bedroom, hours after Tom had pulled out the box, shown them the origami and explained about Hatch. Hal had excused himself right away, had shut himself in his room, didn’t emerge until Tom and Alex had already climbed into Tom’s bed, speculating about the paper wolf until finally Alex dozed off, her face pressed to Tom’s chest.

Hal pushed the door open just slightly and Tom squinted at the light from the hall.

“How long?” Hal asked again.

“I found it when I went looking for the rest of the things that Annie’d kept. George’s pendant and the photo of Eve. I found her box in the attic, but that was there too. Maybe it’s nothing. There’s other stuff in that box. Maybe it’s something of Annie’s, right? Maybe it’s just a coincidence.”

“If you thought it was nothing, you would have said something right from the start,” Hal said. “You didn’t. You kept it to yourself.”

“I don’t want to believe it,” Tom admitted. “We killed him. We did the ritual, just like you said. We all felt it, didn’t we?”

“Unless it started before then,” Hal said. He rubbed at his arms. “Unless we never woke up in the television studio at all, not really.”

“No,” Tom said and shook his head. Alex was awake now. She stirred against his chest. Her arm tightened around his waist. She turned, craned her neck to look over her shoulder at Hal.

“Come on then,” she said, and tipped her head back toward Tom and the bed. 

Hal sighed, but he slipped into the room and shut the door. Tom pushed down the blankets and Hal climbed into the bed, his body warm on the other side of Tom’s.

“It’s just a coincidence,” Tom said, stubborn. “That’s why I didn’t say.”

“He made it believable,” Hal continued, his voice low by Tom’s ear. “We rejected it the first time because it was incomplete – so he gave us something complete, something that we would never want to turn down. And here we are.”

“But what do we do?” Alex asked. “What do we do now that we know?”

“We reject it,” Hal said. “We reject it and we finish what we started.”

Tom shook his head again. “I can’t,” he said. “I don’t wanna. Not now.”

Alex released her grip on his waist. She reached up, turned his face toward hers and kissed his mouth. The kiss tasted of salt and he wondered if she’d been crying.

Tom turned his head to look over at Hal. Hal stared back at him. The blacks of his eyes were huge in the dark. He was frowning.

“We reject it,” Hal said again. “All three of us at once.”

“In the morning,” Alex said. “You’re right, of course, you’re right, but a few more hours. Let us have that. All right?”

Tom was still staring at Hal. Hal’s eyes shifted to Alex when she spoke, then back to Tom. His mouth was still set in the same frown.

“Hal,” Tom said. 

“In the morning,” Hal agreed.

Alex shifted. She pressed a kiss to Tom’s shoulder, then another. Her hand slid across his stomach and then past him as she reached for Hal. Hal let her take his hand and she placed it with hers on Tom’s chest. They stared at each other for a long time, Hal and Alex, like they were having a conversation that only they could hear, and then finally Alex pushed the blankets down, leaned in and kissed Tom’s chest through the worn fabric of his t-shirt.

Hal’s hand was on Tom’s face now, turning Tom back toward him. 

“Hal,” Tom said again. 

Hal closed his eyes, swallowed, and then leaned in and kissed Tom. He pressed his forehead to Tom’s. His thumb stroked Tom’s cheek and his fingers curled back around Tom’s neck behind his ear. Hal swallowed again, and it was Tom who leaned in to kiss him the second time.

It wasn’t fair. He hadn’t even realized that this was what he wanted, but now that it had just barely started he – 

Alex shifted, turned so that she was closer to Tom, her body pressed to his. Her hand slid up beneath his shirt, pushing it up so that she could run her hands over his torso, his sides. It felt good having her touch him like that and when she touched his side it tickled a little and he gasped into Hal’s mouth.

It felt like they were everywhere then, Hal and Alex. Their hands were caressing him, their mouths kissing him. He’d hardly ever done anything like this with one person, and now here he was, in bed with two. But it felt right. He wanted this. He didn’t want to stop them. If they had to go back, if they had to fight Hatch, then Alex was right. He wanted to have this first.

When someone’s hand passed over the front of his trousers, Tom started, broke away from Hal’s kiss to look at what was happening. Alex’s hand was on him, rubbing against him over the worn fabric. Tom pushed his hips up and into her hand, and Alex moved, her fingers quick as they unfastened the button.

“Alex?” Tom asked. He wasn’t sure why he spoke. The word caught in his throat and sounded a little ridiculous. 

She looked up at them, eyebrows raised. 

“Too quick?” she asked. “Do you want me to stop?” Her hand moved to the zip.

“No,” Tom and Hal said at exactly the same moment. Hal cleared his throat afterward, like he was embarrassed that he’d cut in like that.

Alex smiled at them, and then moved in and kissed Tom, leaned over him to kiss Hal as well. Her hand was still working at Tom’s shorts, and then it slid inside and her palm was over him, rubbing at him, and Tom jerked beneath her weight. 

It wasn’t long before Alex was over him, her legs on either side of him and her hands on his chest. She pushed herself back against him and Tom had read enough at the library to know what it meant, to understand what she was suggesting. 

He blinked up at the ceiling and said, “Oh God.”

“So you know sex, yeah?” Alex asked, and he knew she was making fun of him, just a little, but she wasn’t being mean about it. She wasn’t laughing. Actually she looked dead worried suddenly, like she thought maybe she’d just screwed everything up by opening her mouth. She hadn’t, and Tom smiled.

“Yeah,” he said, and she looked relieved, a little embarrassed by her own attempt at a joke. 

Hal got impatient with them then, huffed a little and started moving them along, pulling at Tom’s shirt, pushing at Tom’s arms so that he could get it up and over Tom’s head. Alex leaned down and she kissed Tom again, touched his face with her hands like she couldn’t believe this was happening any more than Tom could.

When Hal started pulling at Alex’s shirt, Alex stopped kissing Tom. She pulled her shirt over her head and tossed it to the floor. Her bra followed and Tom immediately shut his eyes and turned his head away.

“Tom, what are you doing?” Hal asked after a moment. 

“Nothing.” 

“It’s just Alex.” Hal sounded close. “You can look at Alex. She wants you to. That was rather the point.”

Tom opened his eyes and found that Hal was close, was watching him. Hal raised his eyebrows when Tom looked back and his mouth twitched into a bit of a smile. He tilted his head, tipped it toward Alex. “She’s beautiful, Tom.”

It must have been the way Hal said it, his voice all low and dead serious. It was probably that, but whatever it was, Alex made a funny noise and then she leaned over them and pulled Hal up, kissed his mouth kind of desperately. It took the pressure off Tom and he watched them kiss for a minute – watching Hal and Alex kiss made him feel just as funny as doing the kissing himself, he was finding – and then he looked down and caught sight of Alex’s breasts, sort of hanging over him, soft and real and right there.

Finally Alex pulled away from Hal, straightened up and Tom got a proper look. Tom felt Hal’s breath on the side of his neck, knew that Hal was watching him again, and then Hal reached up and ran the backs of his fingers around Alex’s right breast. Alex closed her eyes.

Tom must have made a noise then because Hal reached for him next. He took Tom’s hand in his. He kissed the backs of Tom’s fingers and then he brought Tom’s hand up, guided them until they brushed Alex in the same way that Hal's fingers had done. Alex opened her eyes. She took Tom’s hand from Hal and she set it back against her breast.

She felt soft and round beneath his hand, and he watched the nipple wrinkle up tight as he touched it. He reached over to the other, cupped it in his hand and then swiped his thumb over it and felt it do the same to match. 

Tom knew that he was staring, his forehead knitted up a little, but he couldn’t help it, and anyway, no one seemed to mind. No one seemed to want to rush this anymore. Hal had been watching Alex with him, but he leaned down now and Tom felt him press his mouth to Tom’s bare shoulder. He felt the scrape of Hal’s teeth on his skin, really light, and then the soft press of lips in their place.

Alex leaned in toward him again, her mouth dropping kisses over his.

“I want to do this with you,” she said, so close that her nose knocked against his. She moved back so they could look at each other. “I think that if this has to end, then we need to have this first.”

Hal was still pressing his kisses to Tom’s shoulder, his nose by Tom’s neck. Tom could feel Hal’s hair against his cheek and he closed his eyes.

“Would you like that, Thomas?” Alex asked. “Would you like to have sex with me? I’ll be the flower and you can be the bee.”

He opened his eyes, but she wasn’t mocking him this time, her face was serious and her eyes were warm. She loved him. He could tell. And he loved her too. Her and Hal. Hal and Alex.

Tom thought this might be everything he’d ever wanted, even though he hadn’t known he’d wanted it at all until it happened. Everything before it had felt like it was missing something, but not this, not them. 

It wasn’t normal. It wasn’t a normal life, not even here and human, not with all of them together like this, but McNair had told him to be sure. He’d told Tom to think about the future. And when Tom thought about the future, he thought about Hal and Alex now. He was sure. 

Tom felt himself nod, and then she kissed him again, her hips sliding against him, moving him as she kissed into his mouth.

It was all a bit of a blur after that, if Tom was honest. There were hands and mouths everywhere. Hal’s kisses on his neck, Alex’s hands pushing down his trousers, and then she had her hands _on_ him and he jerked up into her palm, and then she moved again and the next time that he pushed up, he pushed up into her and it was like nothing he’d ever felt before. 

She moved over him, her mouth open and her breath coming out in gasps. Hal held Tom down, tried to kiss his mouth, but it was too much and Tom shook his head. He pushed himself up and Alex reached for him, pulled him in until his face was pressed to her chest, his open mouth against her breast. He felt Hal’s fingers on his back, at his shoulders, tracing lines where Tom’s scars used to be. Tom braced his hand back against the mattress behind him. He thrust up once, twice, and then he was gone, done, shaking and spilling over with it until he fell back against the pillows, and when he opened his eyes and saw the way Hal and Alex were watching him, he thought for a moment that his heart going to threaten to spill over too. Either that or at least pound its way right out of his chest. 

Alex kept moving for a moment and Tom shuddered and squirmed, too much, too soon, and then Hal was there, reaching for her, and she slid off of Tom and onto the bed beside him. Tom felt a little cold, suddenly, a little exposed, and he turned toward Alex just as Hal did too. Alex nodded and it was all the answer Hal seemed to need. Hal was still wearing his shirt, but his trousers were open, pushed down, and he was over her in moments. Alex cried out, the good kind of cry, and she arched her back up, her hand finding Tom’s arm beside hers on the bed and gripping at it hard beneath her fingers.

Tom watched Alex, watched her face as her back slid against the mattress with each of Hal’s thrusts. She stared up at Hal and then she must have felt Tom watching, because she turned to look at him, her mouth open a little, her breath coming out in heavy gasps. 

“Oh,” she said, though the noise was small and breathy and low and hardly counted as a word at all. More a grunt than anything. “Oh.” Her hand slid down Tom’s arm and then her fingers intertwined with his, held on tight.

He reckoned it had probably been a long time since any of them had done this; Alex since before she died, Hal for years and years, and Tom, well, of course Tom never had before at all. He guessed it must have been a while, but he thought it probably made a difference too that it was the three of them that they were with. He thought that part was important as well.

Alex threw her head back then, her mouth open as she let out a low guttural moan. Her hand clamped tight to Tom’s and her legs kicked out, stretched and then pulled back in to press against Hal’s hips. Tom saw that Hal had a hand down between them, and then Hal looked up, watched Alex’s face twist as she sucked air in through her teeth. Hal closed his eyes, his mouth set with determination. He was moving faster now, harder, and when he opened his eyes again, he looked right at Tom. Tom swallowed and stared back at him, held tight to Alex’s hand. 

“Tom,” Hal started to say, but his mouth closed on Tom’s name so it sounded rough and wet and truncated. Hal swallowed and then he screwed his eyes shut, and right as he opened them again, he froze and then shuddered and shouted, his mouth open and his head turned down toward Alex’s chest. Hal’s body twitched and spasmed and then his elbow buckled and he lowered himself down onto Alex. 

“Oh my God,” Alex said after a long moment during which the silence was filled by the heavy sound of their collective breaths.

Hal’s cheek was pressed to Alex’s breast, his face turned toward Tom, and when Alex said it again a moment later - “Oh my God” – Tom couldn’t help but smile and Hal returned it with a smile of his own.

“We’re doing that again,” Alex announced. “Tom, are you okay? You look – hell, you probably look just like me. We’re definitely doing that again, right?”

“Yeah,” Tom said, though it was probably a lie, because of course they wouldn’t be, would they? They all knew it. They all seemed to remember it at the same time and they all fell quiet, lying there sweaty together in Tom’s bed.

Finally Alex said, “You aren’t getting any lighter here, Cupcake.”

Hal was slow in getting off of Alex, but eventually he settled in beside her. Tom looked at their profiles as they both stared up at the ceiling.

“Maybe it could be the same,” Tom said when he was unable to stand the silence anymore. “Back there. Maybe it could be sorta the same.”

“I’ll be dead,” Alex said. She shook her head and turned to look at Tom. She looked good like this. She looked all tired and glowy. “It won’t be the same for me.”

“Yeah,” Tom agreed. “I guess it won’t be.”

Alex continued after a moment. “And once we defeat the Devil good and proper we’ll all be – “

“Even if we weren’t returning to an apocalypse,” Hal interrupted. “It still wouldn’t be like this.”

“How do you know?” Tom asked. 

Hal shook his head, turned to look at Tom and then up to Alex. “Because I won’t choose you. Now that I’ve – now that I’ve started, I will choose the blood over you both. We have to be prepared for that.”

**

“What did you see?” Tom asked. 

It’d been hours since it had happened. After Hal kissed Alex and Alex disappeared, Tom left Hal in the warehouse. He ran, really. He thought he heard Hal shout after him, but he didn’t stop and Hal didn’t follow. Tom went back to the house, but Alex wasn’t there. He waited for her for a while, but he had a shift at the café and Tony needed him there. The café was getting busier. Barry was busier than it was a few weeks back. Still empty compared to before, still scared and mourning, but people were leaving their houses now. The café was open and people had started using it as a gathering spot. Tom guessed that Tony had had the right idea when he’d decided to start hiring. 

That afternoon there was a group in a booth by the window. They were all hunched over, talking low, but Tom overheard some of their conversation while he was wiping down the table next to theirs. They were talking about vampires. There was a group of people in London who were gearing up to fight vampires and these blokes wanted to do something similar in Barry.

“Vampires,” Tom said, acting like he’d just caught the word as he was passing by. “Here? In Barry?”

“They’re everywhere, mate,” one of the blokes said, his eyebrows high as he nodded. “Haven’t you been listening to the news?”

“You think you can fight them?” Tom asked. Tom didn’t actually think there were that many vampires in Barry. Tom didn’t encounter many vampires at all now except the ones that Hal brought with him for Tom to fight. And then there was Hal and Regus, of course.

“Better than letting them just take over, innit?”

Tom shrugged. “What about werewolves?” he asked.

“If the werewolves come to Barry, then we’ll have to fight them too,” one of the other men concluded.

Tom smiled at them, tried to look like he thought they were nutters.

“I thought everybody loved them now,” Tom said. “I seen them. Buying their pictures in the shops and all that.”

“Not everyone,” the first bloke said.

Tom nodded. “I guess not. But how are you going to tell who’s a vampire and who’s a werewolf and who’s just a human?”

“You looking to join up with us?” The fourth bloke asked. 

“Nah,” Tom said after a moment, so it looked like he was thinking about it. “I reckon I’m just gonna keep myself to myself for now. I just think you should be careful is all.”

By the time his shift ended and he returned to the house it was dark. The house was dark too and Tom worried suddenly that Alex hadn’t come back.

“Alex?” he called out from the hall. There was nothing for a second and then just before he shouted out again, she called back from upstairs. 

He took the stairs two at a time and found her standing in the hallway.

“What are you doing just standing here in the dark? Are you all right?” he asked. “I came back here looking for you earlier.”

“Yeah,” Alex said. “I fine. It kind of just got dark around me when I wasn’t paying attention.”

Her hands rubbed at her arms like she was cold. She followed Tom into his bedroom and sat on the edge of his bed while he changed out of his greasy smelly shirt from the café. He threw the shirt to the floor and then sat beside her on the bed.

“Um, so earlier today, you were trying to read Hal’s mind or something, right?” Tom said. “When you touched him, I mean, while he was kissing me.”

“Sort of,” Alex agreed. “I thought maybe I could feel him out, you know?”

“So what did you see?”

“I didn’t see anything,” Alex admitted. “I felt it though, for just a moment. I felt his – it was so quick. I don’t know what it was. I can’t describe it.”

“But you don’t think it was like – like he’s training us for some war or nowt, right?”

“No,” Alex said. “I didn’t feel that.”

“That’s good then,” Tom said.

“I was hoping I’d feel – “

“What?” Tom asked.

“I don’t know. It was too fast. I can’t be sure. I was just hoping it’d be something, some kind of definite answer. But it wasn’t, and I didn’t expect him to – that’s what you’ve been doing with him? All this time? Killing vampires and then letting him shag your brains out against a wall?”

“No!” Tom protested immediately, a little offended that Alex would think he’d do that. “Not shagging! It’s just been like, just kissing, really. Like what you saw. I wouldn’t – no. It’s wouldn’t be right. Not like that.”

Alex had her eyebrows raised and seemed slightly amused by his protesting.

“Looked like it was leading to a bit more than kissing to me.”

Tom shook his head. “I don’t want that. I want what we had before, when it was the three of us. When it was nice.”

“Tom, I – “ She trailed off, stared for a long time at the twisted up blankets on Tom’s bed. Finally she turned back to him, squinted a little.

“Tom, can I try something?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m going to kiss you, all right?”

“Yeah,” Tom said. “Yeah, of course it’s all right.”

She reached for him, set her palm to the side of the face, then moved it back, both hands on either side of Tom’s head. It was funny, her holding his head like that and just looking at him, but her fingers rubbed against his scalp a little and that felt nice. He shut his eyes and then she leaned in and she kissed him. Her mouth was cold, but it was soft, and it felt good the way she kissed him, the way she pulled a little at his lip with her mouth. It felt different than it had before, when they were human, but it still felt good to Tom. 

Alex pulled back.

“He’s right,” she said.

“Right about what?”

“It was something Hal said that night before you came downstairs. He was telling me about ghosts and the things that he knew. Did you know that sometimes when a ghost feels, I don’t know, really fulfilled, I guess, that they can be seen? Properly seen by humans.”

“Yeah,” Tom said. “I think that might have happened for Annie once actually, but it didn’t last. She said she worked in a pub.”

“Yeah, Hal said that too,” Alex agreed. She was frowning, like she’d assumed Hal had lied about that.

“He told me that he could help me feel ‘involved,’” she mimed the quotes around the word as she said it. “A ghost can’t feel, not really, but you could feel my kiss,” she said. “And I could feel you feeling it.”

“Of course I could feel it,” Tom said. “It felt cold, but nice. I liked it.”

“And I could feel it through you,” Alex said. “I knew that we could do that. Lady Mary got her rocks off that way, but it was different with you. When I kissed you, I felt the kiss through you, and it was like I was a part of it.”

“You were a part of it,” Tom said. 

“Hal said that too, but I thought - I thought it would be creepy, like how it seemed when I watched Lady Mary, but it wasn’t creepy at all, really.” She looked up at him. “Was it creepy for you? Knowing that I was basically dipping my fingers into your head like that?”

Tom shrugged. “No, it wasn’t creepy for me. It was nice.”

“Can I kiss you again?” Alex asked.

Tom nodded and then he leaned in, met her mouth in the kiss. He’d missed this. He’d missed kissing someone and having it feel nice, normal almost. As normal as a werewolf kissing a ghost ever could be anyway.

Her hands moved over his head and he thought back to their night together before they woke up in that cell. Alex must have felt that too, because she gasped and kissed him again, and then suddenly it was all different. The memory of it seemed more real, like Tom was there again, lying back on his bed, looking up, and there was Hal over him and then Hal moved and – 

Oh. Tom opened his mouth, and then Hal did whatever he was doing again and Tom felt it, felt it all the way inside him, and he felt Alex’s hand in his and he squeezed it tight. His other hand came up and touched Hal’s arm, held on. Hal was just staring at him, his face intense and determined, and he pushed up against – no, not against – _into_ Tom again and again. 

Tom turned to look at Alex, but she wasn’t Alex at all. It was him. He was looking at himself, and his eyebrows were pulled up in a point and his face, he looked like he was in love, like he’d never seen anything he wanted more than this in his entire life.

Hal did something then, something that felt really good, and Tom watched as the other him responded too, his eyebrows rising a little more at the look on Tom’s face, at the noise he’d made. It was bloody weird and Tom jumped away from Alex, found himself back on the bed, fully clothed, just him and Alex and no one else.

“What did you just do?” Tom asked. 

“I think I – I was thinking back, you know, same as you, and I think I accidentally pushed my memory into your head?”

“You can do that?” Tom asked, though now that he was thinking about it, he did remember Annie saying something about that once too.

“Apparently,” Alex shrugged. She looked apologetic. “I’m sorry.”

Tom took a deep breath. It was weird, but it was – he’d liked it. “It’s okay,” he said. “It’s okay, I don’t think I minded it much.”

“You don’t think you minded it much?” Alex repeated with a laugh. “Well, that’s good, Tom. That’s promising.”

Tom didn’t know exactly what she meant by that, but he nodded and shrugged and said, “Yeah.” 

**

Three vampires, difficult ones, probably pretty old. 

Tom had lost count of the total number of vampires he’d killed. He used to keep track. He used to rip their teeth from their mouths and add them to the black leather cord that McNair had strung for him when Tom killed his first vampire on his own. He’d been fifteen at the time. Before that he’d helped, acted as bait and lured them to the spot McNair picked, but his first kill had meant something. It was cause for celebration. At the time he’d thought it meant that he was growing up. 

Sometimes at night he’d lay awake in the campervan and count them, feeling each tooth between the tips of fingers before moving on to the next. He remembered them all better then, kept track of their faces and sometimes their names if he’d ever known their names at all.

That felt like a long time ago. He hardly thought about that anymore, about taking souvenirs. There wasn’t time. And anyway, he usually got a different reward now. He thought it was probably worse, trading in teeth for Hal’s kisses. 

Hal had pushed him to the ground as soon as the third vampire was dead. Tom fought back at first, pushed at Hal and struggled, never quite sure if one of these goes Hal might get bored and actually decide to try and kill him. 

Not today though. Today Hal pinned Tom to the floor, didn’t even bother to knock the stake from Tom’s hand before he kissed him. Tom thought about it for a moment, Hal over him and the stake still held tight in Tom’s hand. 

He thought about it, and then he relaxed his grip, let the stake roll to the floor, and reached up to hold Hal’s face as they kissed instead.

Hal shifted, repositioned himself over Tom and then he pushed a hand up and under Tom’s shirt, fingers running over Tom’s stomach then down his sides. It tickled a little and Tom gasped and then pushed Hal’s hand away. The touch was too light, playful. It didn’t seem right here, not when they were surrounded by death.

Hal didn’t touch his side like that again. He was already moving on. He pressed a hand hard against Tom’s chest, holding him down against the floor as he shifted and abandoned Tom’s mouth. His other hand pushed at Tom’s thigh as Hal moved down his body, sliding through the dust. Tom grabbed at the hand pressed to his chest, tried to pull Hal back up. If they were going to do this, Tom wanted Hal’s mouth on his. It was easier not to think about it too much if Hal was kissing him. But Hal ignored Tom, didn’t budge, slid back and then leaned in and pressed his next kiss to Tom’s stomach, exposed now where Hal had rucked up his shirt. 

Hal’s hand pushed at Tom’s thigh again and then Hal bent and pressed his mouth to Tom’s hip through Tom’s trousers. Tom started, and he moved, tried to prop himself up on his elbows. Hal pressed his hand back against Tom’s chest, but Tom had better leverage than Hal and he got himself propped up a bit off the floor right as Hal pressed his open mouth over the bulge in Tom’s trousers.

Tom jerked and grunted, his hips pressing up toward Hal’s mouth. He could feel Hal’s breath, hot and moist through the layers of his clothes. Hal turned his head and rubbed his cheek against Tom, and then his mouth was back, pressing over him again.

Tom thought back to the kiss with Alex, to the memories that she’d pushed into his head, to Hal over him, doing things to him that – oh, it felt good, but when Hal’s hand came up, his fingers left a trail of dust across Tom’s stomach before they found the button to Tom’s trousers. Tom stared at that dust, and then he squeezed his eyes shut, shook his head and pulled hard at Hal’s hand.

No, no. This wasn’t how Tom wanted it to go. Not here on a bed of dead vampire, breathing in death, the powder of it, the dust and blood smeared on his skin. This wasn’t at all how it was supposed to be.

“Hal,” Tom said. “Hal, stop.”

He didn’t think Hal would listen. He thought Hal probably knew that if he kept going, Tom would give in, would let himself pretend that this was better than it was, nicer, that it meant more. Tom didn’t want to give in, not here.

Hal did stop though. When Tom pushed at Hal’s back with his knee, Hal moved off Tom, settled onto his back on the concrete by Tom’s side. 

“This is where you’ll end up,” Hal said eventually. “On a pile of bodies with a hard-on.”

“What?” Tom asked.

“That’s what Ian said,” Hal noted. He was breathing heavy too, wasn’t as articulate as usual, and Tom turned his head to look at him. When Tom exhaled, a cloud of dust puffed up from the concrete. “Right at the start. He nailed that one, didn’t he?”

"Yeah," Tom said, not really listening. He watched Hal's throat move as Hal swallowed. “No. What?”

"I imagined it bloodier. Less - " Hal waved a hand through the air. " - dusty. But here we are."

Hal wasn't looking at Tom, was staring up at the ceiling of the warehouse, but he was smiling now. 

Tom didn't know what to say to that. On a pile of bodies with a hard-on. After a moment Hal started to laugh.

"It's not funny," Tom said, but Hal ignored him, kept laughing.

"Werewolves," Hal said finally. "It's always the werewolves."

"I didn’t start this,” Tom pointed out. He wasn’t sure he understood what Hal was getting at, but he was pretty sure that if he did he would take offense. Hal was probably implying that werewolves were stupid or something. What had he called Tom? A beast of the field. 

Tom thought of the vampires that he'd taken out, the powder that clung to the floor and dusted his clothes. He wondered if maybe Hal was right.

Tom pushed himself up off the floor. He brushed off his coat and then he turned to look down at Hal. Hal was watching him and he looked – well, if Tom was honest, he looked hungry. And he looked – the way he was sprawled out like that, tousled, mouth red and one hand high on his thigh. He was close, really close, but not actually touching himself. His legs were spread a little and his eyes were dark – not black, just dark. It was indecent. It was - 

"Um," Tom said. Hal could clearly read Tom pretty well, because he was smiling again, just a little, and now it looked smug.

Tom shrugged. He wiped his palms on his trousers and then held out his hand to help Hal up from the ground. Hal took it, his fingers pressed firm on Tom's wrist as Tom pulled him out of the dust. Hal didn't release Tom's wrist once he was upright. He held him there, close, his thumb swiping back and forth across the skin of Tom's wrist. Tom looked down at their hands, and then back up at Hal. Hal wasn't smiling anymore. His mouth looked slack and soft and Tom felt sure for a moment that Hal intended to kiss him again.

It would be different, a kiss now. It'd be like it was before all this, when kissing had been about love and a future together, the three of them, and not about - whatever they were doing now. Death and games and Hal's hard-on for werewolves or whatever he was trying to say before.

It didn't matter anyway, how different it would be. It didn't matter how Tom's chest tightened at the thought of it, because Hal didn't kiss him again. He probably just wanted to make sure that Tom wanted it. He probably just wanted Tom to feel uncomfortable and on edge. Maybe he'd even hoped that Tom would reach for him, pull him in and start the kissing himself. Tom didn't though, and eventually Hal stepped back and turned away. 

“What if I was there to greet him,” Hal said. He was looking at the floor. He looked like he was far away, wasn’t present in the moment anymore at all.

Tom frowned. Hal wasn’t making much sense today. “What?”

“That’s what Leo said to me once,” Hal shook his head, brow furrowed as he remembered. “A long time ago. But it wasn’t Leo there in the end, was it? It was you.”

“Maybe it was,” Tom said. A lot of good it had done.

It was cruel, that reminder of what might have been – the sense that Tom could have had all of that – kisses that were good and nice and didn’t have anything to do with killing – if he'd done things differently, if he hadn't screwed it all up. If Tom could've been more like Leo from the start, maybe he could have had that Hal. If Leo had been there, things would have been different. Leo would have known how to keep Hal good. Tom remembered what Hal had said that night in the house, that even if Tom and Alex and Annie had done things differently, Hal still might not have been able to hold on. It felt like a lie now. What Hal was saying now was that maybe if Tom had earned it, Hal wouldn't want to kill at all. 

Tom started to turn. They were done here. The vampires were dead, Hal had given him his reward and then thrown it back in his face. It was time for Tom to go home.

Hal started when he realized that Tom was leaving, reached out and grabbed for Tom’s arm, took Tom’s hand in his for a minute, and then dropped it again.

“I’ve gotta go,” Tom said. He didn’t think he wanted to hear more of what Hal had to say right now. He didn’t want to hear about dogfights or routines or the 55 years that he’d never have. He didn’t want to think anymore about his failures.

“I won’t submit to the chair again,” Hal said, finally.

Tom froze. “What?”

“If we’re going to do this, it can’t be the chair,” Hal said again, but that didn’t really explain anything, did it?

“Are we?” Tom asked. “Are we doing this?” 

Hal squeezed his eyes shut, shook his head.

“No,” he said. “I don’t know.”


	5. Chapter 5

If this was a game – if this was the long game that McNair had warned him about, then it meant that there was chance that Tom could win it. And if there was a chance that Tom could win, if there was a chance that Tom would be given the same choice that Leo had, then Tom was going to be prepared for it. He was going to be ready.

Alex found him in the cellar shortly after he started to hoover up the bits of brick and concrete dust on the floor. He’d made a mess of the place over the months, clawing at the walls during his transformations. 

“What are you doing?” Alex asked, shouting over the noise. 

“I just want to be prepared,” he said, turning off the hoover so that they could talk. He’d already started moving things down. He had the rug from the floor of the attic, a small table and the case of dominoes.

Alex looked around. “Prepared for what? The Blitz?”

“No,” he said. “For Hal.” If there was a chance that they were going to do this again, they were going to do it proper. Hal was right. No chair in front of the window, no plastic tarp, and no force feeding Hal mushy banana.

“Tom,” Alex sighed. She sat down on the table.

“I think maybe he’s coming round,” Tom said. “He said last night. He said if we’re going to try this, it can’t be the chair. It has to be something else. This is something else. Look, it’s safe here. If it can hold a werewolf, it can hold Hal. There’s bars on that window in the ceiling, there’s this wall. Look, we can put his bucket behind here, right, and his things for washing up. There’s a sink here and everything. He’ll have a bit of privacy. We can make it nice, comfortable.”

Alex listened to all of this, nodded when Tom showed her the selling points, but her arms were folded across her chest and she was frowning.

“What?”

“I just don’t want you getting your hopes up,” Alex said. 

“I’m not,” Tom insisted. “I want to be prepared, that’s all.”

Alex thought about this and then she nodded. “Okay,” she said. “Okay, then let’s be prepared.”

“I could use some help moving his things,” Tom admitted. “Can you rentaghost with a bed?”

**

This was how the game changed.

The vampire had Tom by the neck. Tom swung his arm around, but he wasn’t at the right angle, he couldn’t get to the heart. He plunged the stake into the vampire’s lower back, the best he could do, hoped that it’d knock him off, but it didn’t. Where the hell had Hal found this guy? Was he part of something bigger for the vampires? Why had Hal brought him here?

Hal hadn’t bothered with bait this time. He’d sent a text message to Tom’s phone with a time and a location. He didn’t really need to send the location. Hal was predictable. He really seemed to like that warehouse. 

To be perfectly honest, Tom didn’t know that Hal even knew how to send messages, but he’d sent this one. Regus must have shown him. It was easier then making vampires stand around on the corner in the hopes that Tom would notice and follow. Hal must have finally figured out that Tom would take the bait, no matter what the bait was, vampire or a quick message sent to his phone.

Hal looked like he was alone when Tom arrived, just standing there in the same abandoned warehouse that he’d dragged Tom to so many times before. There was a pile in the corner of old clothes, a pretty large pile. The clothes had all been worn by vampires at one time. Tom wondered who had swept them up like that, pushed them to the side. Did Hal do it, or did he get one of the vampires that Tom later killed to do it for him?

“Well, where are they?” Tom asked. He shrugged at Hal, looked around.

“Where are who?” Hal returned, eyebrows high.

“Who do ya think? The vampires,” Tom said. “Don’t play dumb, Hal. You brought me here for a fight.”

Hal shook his head, didn’t offer any more information. 

“You brought me here to fight you,” Tom tried to translate, but he must have gotten it wrong again, because Hal just smiled. That was when Tom started to get his hopes up. That was when his heart had started to race a little. And that was when the vampire came at Tom from behind.

Tom tried to pull the vampire’s hands from his neck, pried at his fingers. The vampire stared right at him, his face close. His eyes were black and his mouth was stretched into a sharp smile. He laughed at Tom.

It hit Tom then. This vampire was going to kill him. Tom had let this go on for too long. Hal had tired of it, Hal had started thinking about what he said the last time, about Leo and the chair. He’d said too much and now Hal was going to kill him. Tom had overestimated Hal, just as Hal had always underestimated him. In the end Hal would stand there and smirk, unmoving, the same way he did as he watched Tom kill. Hal was a vampire too, after all, and Tom was stupid to forget it. Everyone was disposable to Hal in the end. 

“Hal!” Tom shouted, renewing his efforts. He pushed at the vampire. He brought his knee up into the vampire’s groin, but he needed more leverage. 

“It’s nothing personal, Tom,” Hal said from somewhere in front of him. 

Nothing personal. Tom growled and pushed harder, suddenly sure that this was it, one of them wasn’t going to leave this room alive, and he didn’t want that someone to be him. 

The vampire released Tom’s neck then, but not for long, just long enough to push Tom hard so that he stumbled and fell back hard against the floor. He didn’t have time to recover. The vampire was on him, kneeling over him, his hands back on Tom’s neck.

It was nothing personal. An evening’s entertainment. This was it. These were Hal’s dogfights, his long game, and maybe Tom was on a winning streak, but that was over now. It was coming to an end. Tom was going to lose and Hal would just have to find a new wolf to torment.

Tom bit at his tongue until he bled, spit the blood and saliva into the vampire’s face, but it wasn’t enough. There was too little of it. It sizzled and burned, but the vampire didn’t let go. He was fucking crazy, this vampire. He was covered in scars. A little werewolf blood didn’t seem like it was anything new to him. 

Where the hell had Hal found him? Where had he come from?

The vampire wiped the blood from his face onto the sleeve of his shirt, and then his smile got wider and Tom knew that this was it. The blood had been the last straw. The vampire was going to kill him now, once and for all.

Tom kicked and struggled, and then he saw Hal over the vampires shoulder. He saw Hal, his face twisted and his eyes black as he suddenly grabbed the vampire by the shoulders, pulled Tom’s stake from the vampire’s back as he yanked him off of Tom. Tom’s head fell back against the floor when the vampire released his grip, surprised by Hal’s sudden intervention.

“What – ?“ the vampire started to say, but he didn’t get to finish, not before Hal plunged the stake right into his heart. 

Tom gasped for breath. His hands rubbed at his neck as the vampire crumbled into dust beneath Hal’s hands.

Tom turned away from Hal, coughed and spit on the floor.

He felt Hal’s hands on him and he pushed Hal away, turned and punched Hal in the face. It wasn’t a good punch. Tom was spent and it felt clumsy, but his fist connected with Hal’s jaw, and Hal fell back away from him. It was good enough.

Tom stood.

“I won’t come back here again,” Tom said. He was done with this. He was done with Hal’s games.

“I don’t believe you,” Hal breathed. He pressed his fingers to his jaw, but when he looked up and found Tom staring down at him, eyes hard, Hal was the one who looked away.

“Try me.” Tom shook his head. “I’m done with you, mate.”

In the end this was just a different kind of dogfight. This warehouse was just a different sort of cage, and it had gone on long enough. Tom could feel it now, he could feel that if he kept doing this, kept coming back here, Hal would win.

“I’m done,” Tom said again. 

He left Hal there on the floor of the warehouse. He didn’t turn back.

**

It was busy when Regus came into the café. Tom nodded to him, but he had a long queue of customers waiting already. Regus waved him back to his work and took a seat at a table by the windows, right behind the four blokes discussing their new supernatural resistance group.

Tom wasn’t sure why Regus was there. He wasn’t even sure he wanted to know why Regus was there. Tom was done with vampires. He was done with Hal. 

Anyway, it all seemed a little anticlimactic so far, really, Hetty’s vampire takeover. It all seemed pretty distant. 

There had been some fighting, sure. Alex still listened to the news reports and she told him about humans getting into fights with vampires in France and America. He’d heard about the two fights in London from Barry’s budding resistance group. They were jealous. But overall, Tom thought the news was relatively quiet. If the vampires had bigger plans, they were letting them simmer, letting humans get used to them before they made their move. No one seemed to want a war, not even Hetty. Hetty didn’t need one though. Not yet. She still had humans falling at her feet.

Tom hadn’t even heard anything about any werewolves in Italy at all, except from Regus, so if that was even true, they must be lying low too. 

Tom didn’t think he really cared about any of it anymore. Tom cared about Alex and the café and Barry. He cared about Hal. He was done with Hal, but he cared about him. And that was it. Allison was gone, Alex’s family was gone. What else was there? Did the rest of it really matter? 

When Tom finally had a moment to relax, he looked up to find that Regus had gone, must have got tired of waiting. Whatever the news was, it couldn’t have been too important.

As it turned out, Regus hadn’t gone. Tom found him behind the café when he went to put the rubbish in the bins. Regus was there and he wasn’t alone. There was a girl with him. He had her pressed up to the wall, his teeth in her throat. Tom recognized her. She’d ordered a burger from him an hour ago.

Tom moved fast, dropped the bags of rubbish and pushed Regus off the girl. He pulled a stake from the back of his jeans and pressed it over Regus’s heart.

Regus held up his hands, his mouth red, covered in the girl’s blood.

“It’s all right,” he said. “Look, look! She’s fine. She offered.”

Tom looked over at the girl. She was holding her neck and staring at them, frightened. But she nodded when Tom raised his eyebrows. 

“Go on then,” Tom said. “Get out of here.”

The girl smiled at Regus, nervous and a little scared, and then she ran off.

“They offer a lot more now,” Regus said. “It’s nice. Some of them think they owe us the world.” He paused. “I guess in a way they do, don’t they?” 

Tom swiped his hand over his head, scratched over his hair and paced in front of Regus. Finally he stopped and pointed the stake at Regus again.

“I ever catch you back here like this again, I will kill you,” Tom said.

Regus stared back at him, his eyes large behind the small rims of his glasses. Finally he licked blood from his lip and he nodded. 

“I believe you,” Regus said.

“You don’t come here for that,” Tom said. “You don’t come anywhere near here for that, you understand? Not ever.”

Regus nodded. “Barry’s off limits. Barry’s yours.”

“Yeah,” Tom said. “Yeah. Barry’s mine.”

Regus smiled a little, pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped the rest of the blood from his face. He wiped his glasses with the unsoiled end of the cloth and then he stuffed it back into his pocket.

Tom nodded and then he slid the stake into the back of his jeans again, finished putting the rubbish in the bins.

“It’s not just me, you know,” Tom said. “Those blokes at the table next to you are gearing up to fight vampires themselves.”

“Yeah,” Regus said. “I heard. I’d be worried they’d get themselves killed, except I don’t think they’re going to find much of a fight around here.”

“They will if they find you biting girls out by the bins,” Tom said. “I don’t think I’d even try to stop them. I’d just stand back and let them try to kill you. Why not?”

Regus cleared his throat, stepped forward toward Tom, his voice lower now, like in case there was someone around who might overhear.

“Tom, did you know that you’ve taken out ninety percent of the vampires in both Barry and Cardiff?” 

“No,” Tom said, surprised by the turn of the conversation. “I didn’t know that. Really?”

“You’ve cleared nearly a 15-mile radius around Barry,” Regus nodded. “There aren’t many of us left now, mostly just the few who’ve caught on, who have been paying attention and are lying low. They’re the ones who are smart enough to avoid Hal. But the rest of them – “ Regus shook his head and then mimed an explosion of dust.

“That’s good,” Tom said. It was good unless the vampires left were all like the one that had nearly killed him before Hal had changed his mind and intervened.

“Where is Hal anyway?” Tom asked. 

Regus frowned.

“I haven’t seen him,” Regus said. “That’s why I’m here. I thought he might be with you.”

“Why would he be with me?” Tom said. 

“Because he’s – where else would he be?” Regus asked. “He’s obsessed with the two of you.”

“Not that obsessed,” Tom said. “He tried to kill me. Haven’t seen him since then.” 

It had been a few weeks and he hadn’t heard anything from Hal. No messages, no vampires on the corner, nothing. He’d thought about transforming in the basement after Hal nearly got him killed. He thought about transforming down there and just tearing apart all of Hal’s things, but he didn’t. He went to the woods and when he came back the next morning, Alex said that Hal hadn’t turned up then either.

“He tried to kill you?” Regus repeated, confused. 

“Not himself,” Tom clarified. “He had some nasty vampire come to do the dirty work. Spit my blood right in his face and it didn’t stop him. He kept coming at me. Hal staked him in the end, but it was close.” He rubbed at his neck, remembering.

“Huh. That sounds like it was Virgil,” Regus said. “You killed him?”

“Hal killed him,” Tom repeated. 

“Well, there you go. Virgil dead makes ninety-one percent of the vampires in Barry and Cardiff.”

**

Three days after Tom spoke with Regus by the bins, he came downstairs to find Alex standing at the window looking out at the street. Tom was hungry, had just woke up, and he rubbed at his face and started toward the kitchen before he stopped and asked, “Something wrong?”

“It’s Hal,” Alex said. “He’s outside.”

“What?” Tom forgot about his breakfast and rushed across the room to stand at the window beside her. He pushed up the blinds with his fingers and peered out.

It was definitely Hal. He was standing out there on the other side of the street, the exact spot where he usually had one of his vampires wait to catch Tom’s attention.

“What’s he doing?” Tom asked.

“Nothing,” Alex said. “He’s just been standing there.”

“How long?”

“A while,” Alex said. “I don’t know, an hour? Two? I was going to wake you, but I was afraid that if I left, he’d be gone when I got back. Should we go out there?”

Tom watched as Hal studied a crack in the pavement. He glanced up at the house, squinted against the sun, and then he looked away again. 

If they went out there, it would be another fight. It would end in pushing and punching and mouths crushed up against each other. It would start all over again, the cage of the warehouse and the vampire opponents. It’d get worse, bigger. Eventually Hal really would get bored and he’d find new ways to make it interesting. Maybe a real cage, maybe an audience. It was the dogfights again. They were evolving.

That couldn’t be it though. That couldn’t be where Hal was going with it, not when the opponents were vampires. He could blame their deaths on Tom for now, but eventually others would catch on, would see Hal wiping out his own and wonder why they let him get away with it. And then what would Hal do? What would come next? Regus’s war and Hal ready with a trained attack dog by his side? Tom wasn’t playing that game either.

Tom shook his head. “He should come to us. It’s our terms now, right. He comes to us, them’s the rules.”

Hal didn’t come to them though. He stood on the corner for fifteen more minutes, just staring at the house, moving once in a while, pacing, and then as Alex and Tom watched, he squeezed his eyes shut, shook his head, and walked off at a brisk pace. 

Tom started, thought about rushing to the door, but Alex grabbed his arm. 

“He comes to us,” Tom said again, a reminder to himself.

**

Hal returned in the early hours of the following morning, well before the sun came up. Alex shook Tom awake, gestured toward the window. They stood there together in Tom’s room looking down at the street.

“He’s standing there again,” Alex said. “Does he think that if he does it long enough, we’ll give in? Just go along with whatever it is he’s got planned?”

Tom shrugged. He’d been thinking all day of what Regus had told him by the bins. Almost all of the vampires between Barry and Cardiff. Hal had rounded them up, brought them to Tom and watched them die.

“Barry’s yours,” Regus had said.

“Yeah. Barry’s mine,” Tom agreed, not really thinking about it at the time. He was thinking about it now.

Barry didn’t need those blokes in the café to protect it from vampires. Eventually they’d get bored here and they’d go somewhere else. They’d fight their battles in London or Leeds or Bristol. Tom thought it was better that way. He didn’t want them in Barry. He didn’t want any of it here. If there were vampires in Barry, then they were Tom’s to deal with, and they wouldn’t be there for long.

“We should set the rules now,” Tom said. “Just in case that’s what this is.”

“Rules,” Alex repeated. “For Hal?”

“For all of us,” Tom said, but yeah, mostly for Hal.

“Okay,” Alex agreed. “What are the rules?”

“He doesn’t leave the house,” Tom said. “He stays in the cellar until he’s through the first part of the blood lust, then maybe he can come out, but we don’t leave him alone. We don’t leave him alone and he doesn’t leave the house. Not ever.”

Alex nodded. “Right.”

“I’ll have my shifts at the café, and I’ll have to go to the woods for my change.”

“And I don’t let him out of the house,” Alex confirmed. “Two years, Hal said. Leo figured two years, just to be safe.”

“Yeah,” Tom said. “And no one comes in. No vampires, no werewolves. He’s gonna try to boss us around, just like he used to. We don’t let him do it. He doesn’t get to be in charge, not anymore.”

“Agreed,” Alex said. “We can’t trust him to tell us when it starts to get too hard for him. Not after the last time.”

“Right,” Tom said again.

“Are we going to be able to do this though?” Alex asked. “You and me?”

Tom shrugged. “We’re going to have to, aren’t we? This is it. Time to grow up. Time to make a choice.” 

“And we’re choosing Hal?” Alex asked. “I mean, don’t get me wrong. I’m with you. I just think we need to say it out loud. Even after everything, we’re choosing Hal. We’re turning our backs on everything that happens outside our door and we’re choosing him.” 

Tom thought about it. “Yeah,” Tom said. “I’m choosing Hal.” He wasn’t fooling anyone anymore. Not even Alex. Everyone could see the lengths that Tom would go to hold on to the people he loved. McNair, Eve, Alex and Hal.

“Can we really do that though?” Alex asked. “What’s going on out there, Hetty and those werewolves, that’s just going to get bigger. It’s going to get closer.”

“It’s not happening in Barry,” Tom said and shook his head.

“Because Barry’s always been so safe in the past?” Alex asked, the sarcasm clear in her voice.

“Because Barry’s ours,” Tom said. “And we’ll defend it.”

Alex opened her mouth, and then she paused and shook her head. “What?” 

“You heard what Regus said,” Tom said. “I’m the most dangerous werewolf he’s ever met. That’s what he said, right? And between the three of us, we’ve killed about every vampire between here and Cardiff. The only ones left are the ones that are scared and hiding. New vampires show up, we kill them too. Werewolves, we chase them off. Word gets out. Barry’s ours and we’ll fight to protect it.”

“That doesn’t really sound like the definition of staying out of it,” Alex noted.

“We’re keeping Hal out of it,” Tom shrugged. “We’re keeping it out of the house and we’re keeping it out of Barry. You can help me if you want, but you don’t have to. I’ll take care of that part myself.”

Alex turned and looked around the room. She looked at the clippings on Tom’s wall, at Tom’s unmade bed and the four cups he’d left sitting on the bedside table. Then she turned and looked at Tom.

“Maybe this is what he was doing all along,” Alex suggested. “Turning you into this. Preparing you for it.”

Tom shrugged again. “Maybe. Maybe this was always how it had to go.”

Alex looked back down to the street. “He’s gone,” she said. 

She was right. The corner was empty.

“He’ll be back,” Tom said, suddenly confident that it was true. They’d chosen Hal. There was nothing left to do now but to wait for Hal to choose them.

**

They’d been watching him walk up and down the pavement outside the house for twenty minutes. A woman walked past him and he stopped, tipped his head and spoke to her. She smiled back at him and when she walked off he started to follow, then changed his mind and walked the other way. That was good. Tom would have had to go after him if he’d followed her. 

“That’s a good sign,” Alex said, echoing Tom’s thoughts.

They watched until finally Hal changed his course and turned onto Crestview Road, disappeared from their view with one final glance up at the house.

Alex sighed. She turned and kicked at a pile of magazines on the floor. 

“This is getting really old,” she said. She moved over to the wall, leaned against it and then slid down to the floor. 

Tom turned to look at her.

“Are you ever going to put any furniture in here?” he asked. It was weird, this room being so empty all the time, just magazines and a radio and sometimes Alex lying on the floor. 

Now that they’d moved most of Hal’s furniture to the cellar, all of the bedrooms felt so empty except for Tom’s. It made him feel lonely when he thought about it.

“It feels like giving in,” Alex said. “It’s admitting that I’m not going anywhere.”

“Do you want to go?” Tom asked. 

Alex frowned and then she shook her head. “No,” she said. “I don’t want to go. Not now. I’ve gotta see how this pans out first.”

“And if it pans out good – “

“Then I guess I have even more reason to stick around,” Alex said. She looked to Tom and then she smiled, like she was trying to stop herself but she couldn’t. 

“We could just bring in a chair or something,” Tom said. 

“Yeah,” Alex agreed. She was still smiling. “Maybe we should bring in a chair or something.”

Alex reached over and ran her hand over his head, then cupped his face with her palm. She leaned in and kissed him, light and affectionate, and then settled against him, her head resting on his shoulder. Tom closed his eyes just before Alex started and sat back up.

“Did you hear that?” Alex asked. 

“Hear what?” Tom asked, but then he did hear it. Knocking at the front door.

Tom turned to Alex, eyebrows raised, and she stared back at him, her mouth open, waiting. The knocking sounded again.

That pushed them into action and Tom scrambled to his feet, raced down the stairs. By the time he reached the door, Alex was already there, looking out the window.

“It’s him. It’s Hal.”

**

Tom and Alex had moved almost all of Hal’s things. There was the bed, the chair, the bookshelf with the books arranged exactly as Hal had had them upstairs. They’d had to make a list for that. It had taken an entire afternoon. There was the box of dominoes, the bicycle. There was the photograph of Leo. And there were new locks, stronger locks, on the outside of the door.

“Well?” Alex asked. “What do you think?”

Hal looked around, took it all in. “You set this up, knowing that I’d give in?”

“Well, not knowing,” Alex said. She glanced at Tom. “But we’d hoped.”

Hal looked up at that. 

“What about your unfinished business?” he asked. 

She scrunched up her face, shrugged. “Must be something else,” she said. “Maybe when you’re less – less like this, you can help me figure that out.”

Hal was frowning but he nodded. He turned to Tom then and Tom shrugged, his hands shoved into the pockets of his shorts.

“You really think I can do this?” Hal asked. 

“Course we do,” Tom said. 

Hal shook his head, his face indicating that Tom had misunderstood. “You think I’d want to?” 

“You’re here,” Alex pointed out. “Listen, you told Tom it couldn’t be the chair. This isn’t the chair. This –“ She pointed to the room. “This is a way better idea than that bloody chair.”

Hal held up his hand for her to stop. He opened his mouth to speak, smiled and shook his head.

“I’m here because what I want is the two of you,” Hal clarified. “Not because I want to stop killing. I’m not here for humanity. There’s a difference.”

“Well, you can’t have both, mate,” Tom said. “It’s us or the blood.”

“Yes, I know,” Hal said. “I am standing here in your dungeon, Tom. I’m aware of the options.”

“Then I guess the question becomes, how bad do you want us?” Alex asked.

Hal laughed. He pointed at her, his nose scrunching up for just a second before his face relaxed again. He paced the cellar, ran his fingers over the scratches on the walls. He stared behind the corner at the bucket and the sink, looked up at the bars on the window in the ceiling. Finally he stopped, touched the frame of the bed, then sat down on the edge of the mattress. 

“I can’t promise that this will work,” Hal said. His voice was lower now. It had lost some of its hardness. “I can’t promise you fifty years. I can’t even promise you five.”

“But you want it to work,” Tom said. “That’s why you’re here, right, because you want to try.”

Hal swallowed. Tom thought he saw him nod, but it was subtle. Tom might have made it up. 

“That’s the thing about werewolves,” Hal said with a smile. “Once in a while you meet one who plays the long game. Sometimes you meet two in a row.”

Hal looked up at Tom and Tom stood his ground. He held Hal’s eye, refused to be the first to turn away, and eventually it was Hal who looked down. 

“You stay here now,” Tom warned. “And that’s it. We’ll get you through the bloodlust, but you don’t leave this room until we say so. And you don’t leave this house.”

Hal stared hard at the floor. Tom could tell that he was thinking it over. He could tell by the way Hal’s eyes moved, dancing back and forth over the same spot on the floor, growing big and wide for a moment before he blinked them back into focus. 

“If you had to choose,” Hal said, finally, still staring at the floor. “Anything in the world. What would it be?”

Alex turned to Tom and Tom shook his head.

“We’ve already answered that question,” Tom said. “It’s your turn now.”

Hal pressed his lips together and stood from the bed. He turned and he stared at it for a long time. He looked hard at the photograph of Leo beside it. Eventually he turned back to Tom and Alex. They watched as he shrugged out of his coat and then he crossed the few steps to the door, stood before them. Tom could feel his heart beating fast in his chest. He knew that Hal could probably hear it. Hal could probably smell Tom’s fear, his anticipation. And Tom wasn’t alone. Tom could feel Alex’s tension in the air beside him. This was it. This was where it started again.

Either that or this was where it ended entirely.

Hal reached out and handed Alex his coat. She stood there, frozen for a moment, and then she took the coat from his hand. Hal turned to Tom and this time when he nodded it wasn’t subtle. This time Tom couldn’t have made it up. 

“I’ll need you to board up that window,” Hal said.


End file.
